OUR BOARD

The PLSA Board makes sure that we can fulfil our mission to help everyone achieve a better income in retirement. It sets our strategy, allocates our resources, reviews our financial performance and monitors the effectiveness of our lobbying, events, training and membership products and services.

Board appointments and membership are set out in our Rules. The Board meets four times a year. It has two committees: the Audit and Risk Management Committee and the Remuneration and Nominations Committee. 

Emma Douglas
Aviva
Chair, PLSA Board

Emma Douglas has joined Aviva in October 2021 as Director of Workplace Savings and Retirement business, with the accountability to deliver the best possible outcome for over 4 million customers/members and their £81bn of assets as they save for and access savings in later life. Emma is also the Chair of the Pensions & Lifetime Savings Association; having previously chaired the PLSA’s Policy Board since 2018.

Before joining Aviva, Emma held the position Head of DC at Legal & General Investment Management, where Emma was primarily responsible for developing LGIM's DC business and Investment Strategy.  Joining LGIM in 2014 from Mercer where she held the position of Partner and Head of Mercer Workplace Savings. Previous roles in Emma’s career include the Head of DC Sales at BlackRock and Head of DC Pensions at Threadneedle Investments.

All told, Emma has more than 20 years of experience in the investment management industry, graduating from Trinity College, Oxford, and holds an MBA from Manchester Business School via a Women in Management Scholarship from the Guardian.

John Chilman
RPMI
Chair, PLSA Policy Board

John joined as CEO of RPMI, and an Executive Director of Railpen, in June 2019, having previously served for 12 years as a Director of the Railways Pension Scheme Trustee Company, and Chair for the last five years. John is also an Independent Trustee of the Nestlé UK Pension Fund.

John is a Chartered Accountant by qualification, and was previously Group Head of Pensions at National Grid. Prior to that John held senior financial, commercial and pension positions at a number of large companies, including PricewaterhouseCoopers, South Western Electricity, Shell, HBOS and FirstGroup.

Dave Coplin

Dave Coplin has over 25 years’ experience working with or for the world’s largest technology companies, most recently as Microsoft’s “Chief Envisioning Officer”, providing organisations and governments around the world with strategic advice and guidance that enables them to deliver lasting growth and market relevance through the adoption of transformational technology.

Dave is an established author on topics surrounding the future of work and our relationship with technology. His first book: “Business Reimagined”, provided a view of a new working environment based on collaborative and flexible working. His second book, “The Rise of the Humans” provides a further call to action, for both individuals and organisations to harness not hate the digital deluge, to rise up and take back control of the potential that technology offers our society.

Alongside his consulting and public speaking work, Dave is also an independent non-executive director for Mitchells and Butlers plc and Vianet Group plc, helping to deliver on their strategies for growth by providing strategic advice and guidance on the increasing relevance of digital technologies across their business operations.

Jamie Fiveash
Smart UK

With almost 30 years’ experience in financial services, Jamie is currently the Chief Executive Officer for Smart UK and Ireland. His key responsibilities include the growth of the Smart Pension Master Trust and Smart's Keystone platform in the UK and Ireland. He is passionate about transforming pensions and the use of technology to make sure they bring greater value and help improve later life for all people.

Before joining Smart in 2018, Jamie was instrumental in the design and delivery of The People’s Pension, whilst holding various C-suite roles as an Executive Director at the People's Partnership (formally B&CE).

 Kate Hadley
Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association
Director of Events 

Kate is responsible for all events and training services delivered by the PLSA.  She has over 20 years experience of  successfully leading on complex, high profile events for the financial services and healthcare sectors, both in the UK and overseas.

 Ceri Howells
Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association
CFO 

Ceri is the Chief Financial Officer and joined the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association in 2021.

She has over 25 years of management accounting experience across mining, media and logistics with over 18 years at Anglo American PLC. Her career focus has been to challenge business budgets and results to provide decision supportive insight at an executive and Board level.

[email protected]

Gregg McClymont
Executive Director, Public Affairs – IFM Investors

Gregg McClymont’s career has encompassed academia, politics, pensions, and investment management. Gregg joined IFM Investors in July 2020 from leading UK industry pension fund The People’s Pension. He was previously UK Shadow Minister of State for Pensions 2011-2015 and a Member of Parliament 2010-15. Gregg was also a member of the Prime Minister’s Further Devolution to Scotland Commission 2014.

Before entering politics, he was a Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford – having trained as a historian in the Universities of Glasgow, Pennsylvania and Oxford.

After losing his parliamentary seat in the 2015 General Election, Gregg spent three years at Aberdeen Asset Management/Aberdeen Standard Investments. He is the co-editor of three volumes on global pension system design, Towards a new pensions settlement: the international experience (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, 2018, 2020).  

Julian Mund
Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association
Chief Executive

Julian joined the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association as Commercial Services Director in 2013 and became Chief Executive in 2017.

Prior to this he worked at the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) for almost 16 years. He undertook a variety of roles such as the Managing Director of their commercial company and their Director of Operations. He led on business growth and strategic development across CIPFA's commercial business as well as the delivery of their member services.

Julian worked on school policy at the Department for Education before joining CIPFA.

Laura Myers
LCP

Laura is the Head of DC at LCP, leading the strategy of the DC practice, which advises over £60 billion of UK DC assets impacting over 6 million DC savers across over 125 clients.  Using her in-depth understanding of the market, Laura helps her clients cut through the complexity when it comes to the full range of DC issues; from establishing appropriate investment strategies, to extracting best value for money. Her leadership and passion is reflected every day by her ambitious and growing team, as she inspires them to develop innovative solutions for clients that improve the financial wellbeing of their savers.

Laura is an industry influencer, always on hand to offer her view of how the DC savings and financial wellbeing landscape is evolving and how employers, trustees and providers should react.  As well as chairing LCP’s market-leading annual DC Conference and spearheading the firm’s thought leadership on shaping pensions that are fit for the future, Laura regularly speaks at a range of events. She is also a member of the DC industry governance group and the DC Asset Security Working Party.

Carol Young
USS

Carol became Group Chief Executive Officer of Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) in September 2023. Carol’s career spans over 20 years across in-house and consulting roles and includes a decade as an investment consultant.

Prior to joining USS, Carol was the Director of Reward & Employment at Natwest Group. She led the teams responsible for Reward, Pensions, Benefits, performance management, core HR employment policies, Employment Law, Industrial Relations, Business Acquisitions and Disposals and HR regulatory work. This included the flexible benefits programme for more than 60,000 colleagues, and DB and DC pension arrangements for around 300,000 members (over c.£55bn liabilities) worldwide. Carol is a CFA Charterholder and has served as independent trustee on a number of boards.

She is a non-executive director of the PLSA and has chaired PLSA policy councils and the CBI pension panel.