Louis Brandeis - Supreme Court of the United States
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant"
Why Transparency in the retirement income sector is so important:
The integrity and sustainability of the retirement savings industry & the personal pensions sector are crucial to the healthy long-term functioning of societies worldwide.
This is because individuals rely on personal pensions & lifetime income products to provide them with financial security in their retirement years.
Without a reliable and sustainable source of retirement income, many people will become dependent upon already strained government pensions such as social security or worse, parents will become financially dependent upon their children(!) to support them in their old age.
Therefore it is crucial that operators and providers in these industries are held to the highest standards of care towards their customers.
Often this is attempted by introducing thousands of additional rules & regulations to reign in the excesses in the sector however all of these additional rules make retirement products more complex to understand and almost always increase costs resulting in lower levels of retirement income for the retiree.
Tontine Trust believes there is a better way:
Rather than creating another 10,000 rules & regulations, we should insist upon far simpler products and far greater transparency.
By increasing transparency, we can ensure that retirement products and pension funds are managed effectively and that individuals and society as a whole can have confidence in their financial security in old age.
By compelling retirement product & pension providers to disclose key information, such as their assumptions in terms of expected investment returns and life expectancies, we can make them more accountable for their decisions, we can increase the amount of information available to beneficiaries and we will improve the ability of regulators, the media and the industry itself to monitor providers for signs of trouble before it is too late.
This is why Tontine Trust is committed to pioneering a policy of 'radical transparency' and it's also why we support the work of campaign groups such as the UK not-for-profit Transparency Taskforce.
Let's work together to create a retirement & pensions system that we can all rely on in our golden years.
Radical Transparency via Stacks Blockchain
Stacks is a next generation blockchain that enables developers to build decentralized applications as well as store data on the most secure public ledger in the world, the Bitcoin blockchain.
The Stacks blockchain enables Tontine Trust to fulfill its commitment to become the first member of the global retirement industry to provide a permanent public record of the real world source data upon which our patented robo-actuary 'Tontinator' calculates all of the forecasts, payouts and redistributions associated with the operation of our platform.
Life Expectancy data by the Human Mortality Database
The Human Mortality Database (HMD) is a collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany), the University of California, Berkeley (USA) and the French Institute for Demographic Studies (France).
The HMD provides detailed high-quality harmonized mortality, life expectancy and population estimates and is considered the world´s leading scientific data resource on mortality in developed countries.
By utilising independent data, we ensure that our our payout forecasts remain wedded to reality.
This stands in stark contrast to others in the industry that utilise 'internal life expectancy models' the private nature of which open up possibilities where those providers could theoretically manipulate annuity pricing or give a distorted view of their financial strength.
Inflation forecasts by Truflation
Truflation is a provider of unbiased global inflation data to enable better decision-making.
Their system uses 10 million data points and updates it's indices daily, offering more comprehensive and up-to-date information compared to traditional inflation indices which are updated monthly.
Truflation's data is published to their blockchain to provide a secure, immutable source of truth.
Working with the Transparency Taskforce
Founded in 2015 by Andy Agathangelou, the 'TTF' is a collaborative global campaigning community dedicated to driving up the levels of transparency in financial services and to rid the financial industry of its short term profit mindset.
On the back of several successful campaigns, in 2020 TTF was appointed as the Secretariat of the United Kingdom's All Party Parliamentary Group on Pensions Scams.
We are proud to support the work of the TTF and are honoured to have been the first, and so far only, retirement income firm to receive their Transparency Award.