Dinesh Visavadia

Trustee Director

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Dinesh is a Director at Independent Governance Group  who specialises in providing professional pensions trusteeship and governance services for occupational pension schemes.

Dinesh has broad trustee experience in both the pensions arena and the charitable sector. His experience covers pension and investment strategies for Defined Benefit, Defined Contribution, Cash Balance and offshore unfunded pension arrangements. He has considerable experience of chairing and leading teams and currently has a mix of chair, co-trustee and sole trusteeship appointments.

Dinesh is a trustee of Britvic, Channel 4, Action For Children Pension and Wincanton pension schemes and has also been a trustee of numerous Charities for some years, including RNLI Council and Pension Fund, The Ambulance Staff Charity, and St Christopher’s Fellowship. He is currently Chair of the City & Guilds scheme and on the City & Guilds Council.

Prior to joining IGG, Dinesh held senior pensions management roles at Britvic Soft Drinks Ltd, John Lewis Partnership, Royal Mail Group plc and JP Morgan.

Dinesh firmly believes in a collaborative working relationship. His personal style is to encourage openness and working together to arrive at the best solutions – everyone’s views and opinions must be respected as diversity makes the discussion richer.

Dinesh is an Accredited Member of the Association of Professional Pension Trustees (APPT).

  • Adviser review
  • DC Trust to DC Master Trust transfer.
  • Difficult Valuation Exercises
  • Expertise in all facets of delivering Governance services
  • Expertise in Special situations – PIE and ETV exercises
  • Expertise with or moving to a Fiduciary and/or delegated investment model
  • Fund raising/Re-financing
  • Investment Strategy
  • Mentoring lay trustees
  • New scheme establishment
  • Ongoing support to DB/Hybrid schemes – either in context of Chair or Board member
  • Ongoing support to DC
  • Ongoing support to large and/or complex schemes – in area of common trustee boards/rationalising advisers
  • Repairing/rebuilding trustee relationships
  • Risk transfer (buy in/buy out)
  • Scheme Closures
  • Scheme mergers and demerger
  • Scheme Wind up DB and/or DC/ or in surplus
  • Scheme/sponsor under TPR investigation
  • Sole Trusteeship
  • Working to agree long term objectives
  • Working with a Challenging Covenant review

Experience of liability mitigation exercises and in obtaining authorisation for a new DC master trust.

Considerable experience of dealing with Regulators and has schemes which are undergoing either Regulatory scrutiny or oversight.

Experience of administration provider transitions – one for the Action for Children Fund charity and another for Thorn Lighting. In both cases it was necessary to agree the right SLAs but at reasonable standard core fees. In addition, Dinesh has experience of changing investment advisers and Actuary. He was able to achieve the right shape of services contract for fixed core fees.

Significant pensions experience including investment strategy, Fiduciary Management, managing buy-in transactions, scheme mergers, managing actuarial valuations, leading the closure to new employees and establishing a new DC Scheme, updating governance arrangements, sitting on the actuarial valuation, strategic and defined contribution committees for the Action for Children Pension Fund and managing the termination of the two DB schemes for St. Christopher’s Fellowship.

Considerable experience of chairing and leading teams. Dinesh currently has a mix of Sole Trusteeship and Chair appointments, the most high-profile ones being Britvic, McNicholas Construction, Wincanton, Action for Children Pension Fund, and Channel 4.

Developed strong leadership skills in previous roles as Head of Pensions. Engaged extensively with the Board members when leading major reviews of pension and investment strategies, implementation of changes and governance at these organisations by engaging with the Board members. At Royal Mail, Dinesh developed good relationships with the Trade Unions on pension issues which worked very well in developing their thinking.

Recently undertaken investment strategy reviews. This included moving to a Fiduciary Manager for one of his schemes and to crystallising good investment gains and matching the cash flow of the schemes. In addition, Dinesh led the buy-in of the full benefits for one of his schemes and is evaluating another scheme’s opportunity to secure benefits through insurance.

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