Making the case for defined benefit pension plans self-adjusting steering schemes

In an economically and politically instable context with strong demographic shifts and weak pension plan long-term robustness, Self-Adjusting Steering Schemes (SASS) present several advantages including reactivity, relevance, economic fairness, smooth incremental adjustments and protection against political malice. This article proposes a probabilistic model to illustrate the impact of SASS on overall liability risk mitigation through some simulations on a simplified defined benefit pension plan. It highlights the cost of inaction in pension plan liability management and advocates the systematic implementation of the proposed SASS schemes. The proposed SASS schemes act on several parameters such as retirement start age, pension computation formulae or pension indexation by dynamically changing their value to cope with the materialized risk factors. It concludes with a discussion on the fairness of the proposed risk-sharing approach among the pension plan's different stakeholders. © Serials Publications Pvt. Ltd.