The Awards: IPE Conference & Awards 2022 reference version

The IPE Awards reward excellence and innovation in Europe's diverse pensions industry, creating a meaningful annual benchmark enabling pensions providers of all shapes and sizes to measure their investment and other areas of performance against their peers at national, regional and global levels as well as against institutions of a similar size, remit and resource.

We welcome entries from all types of pensions structures and arrangements from across Europe, including cash, defined benefit, defined contribution and hybrid plans, irrespective of size and the regulatory environments in which they operate.

In 2021, we received over 350 entries across 43 categories from pension funds worth collectively €2.3 trillion.¹
.
These institutions represent some 72.9.¹
million pension fund members in 20 different countries across Europe.
These entries were judged by a judging roster of circa 90 judges.

40+ categories enable you to contribute to the benchmarks that the IPE Awards create to measure your approach and performance against your peers across Europe
Winning an IPE Award inspires trust and confidence among your members and rewards the hard work of your teams
You can get constructive feedback from the experts and specialists making up the judging panels
The entries provide the perfect opportunity to share and exchange ideas as well as learn from your peers
You can showcase your approach to current challenges
Attending the IPE Conference & Awards offers a unique networking opportunity

Corporate pension funds and group retirement plans
French and Swiss Caisses de Retraite
Industry-wide multi-employer pension funds
Life insurance and pensions insurance companies
Professional multi-employer pension funds
Public sector pension funds
Sovereign reserve and buffer funds
National first pillar and pay-as-you-go pension funds

The IPE Awards cannot and does not accept entries from pensions-owned investment vehicles or funds. In addition, the IPE Awards reserves the right to restrict entries from pension-owned asset managers to themed awards only in support of specific areas of the investment strategy they pursue for the pension fund that owns them.

The IPE Awards are arranged on four levels:

Gold themed and European awards
Silver themed and European awards
Bronze themed awards
Country/regional and themed awards

Each entrant must enter their respective country or regional award and may then enter as many of the themed awards as they like, including the three bronze awards, the silver themed awards for Active Management, Passive Management and Small Pension Fund and the gold level Long-Term Investment Strategy and Commitment to Diversity awards.

For the silver European awards for the Corporate, Multi-employer/Professional and Public Pension Funds, the Sovereign Reserve Fund and gold European Pension Fund of the Year awards, IPE builds the categories based on the winners and other well-performing entrants that we include at our discretion from across all the country/regional and themed awards. You do not prepare entries for these categories

For the gold level Outstanding Industry Contribution award, we invite all IPE readers to send in nominations based on a specially drafted entry form. Once we have formed the short-list based on the nominations, we invite all the judges to vote for their top three.

Entering the IPE Awards is completely confidential and free of charge. We will not forward, share or use any part of any entry unless it wins. We only reveal the names of the winners and short-lists on the night of the awards. Finally, we reserve the right to use winning entries to form an article in the winners supplement that is made available after the Awards Dinner and Ceremony and then distributed with the subsequent issue of IPE.

You may submit the same entry and/or additional entries for the country/regional Awards and/or the themed Awards, provided it is relevant. If you do submit the same entry for your country/region and different themes, it will be judged independently by the relevant judging panels.

We use a streamlined but sophisticated online entry system that is divided into five parts:

The first is simply for the category and name of the entrant.
The second collects fundamental data such as the size of your assets, performance figures and fund structure.
The third is a short text based area known as the Overview and Investment Strategy. This is a 350 - 450 optimum word count text area that asks you to provide a detailed summary of your fund's history, overall objectives and investment strategy. This is a mandatory response to provide the judges with key information about your pension fund or similar institution. Bullet points are acceptable but please ensure they contain enough information to give the judges a solid understanding of your organisation.
The fourth part is a longer text based area with an optimum range of 750 - 850 words for your country/regional entry and any themed awards you wish to take part in.
The fifth is to upload your logo and any other supporting attachments such as graphs and performance tables.

Once the entries are submitted, we invite the judges to review and apply a score based on a five band 20-point matrix.

HOW the IPE Awards WORK