Could a cold collateral winter be coming for pension plans?

UK LDIs passed an early test from rising rates, but margin call pressure is mounting

Like the UK’s consumers, its pension funds have been feeling the icy grip of rising rates.

As the Bank of England hiked its base rate to tackle rising inflation, UK pension funds faced huge collateral calls – some running to hundreds of millions of pounds – on the derivatives used to hedge their liabilities.

“On days where we've had large, outsized market moves, you're actually talking about margin calls of multiple hundreds of millions of pounds,” says Evan Guppy, head of liability-driven