Comprising chiefly investment consultants, academics and former pension fund executives from across Europe, the IPE Awards judges are specially chosen according to their region and/or area of expertise. Up to 100 judges can be involved in the IPE Awards.

 

Judging involves a two-stage review process for all the categories except the country/regional awards and is completely transparent. The judges make use of IPE's online entry system to review and score the entries. Each judging panel features at least four judges. For the Outstanding Industry Contribution and Pension Fund Achievement of the Year, we invite all the judges to vote on the short-listed candidates.

 

The first phase of the judging process invites members of each judging panel to read and score the entries according to a 20-point score matrix that ranks each against its peers, nationally, regionally and globally. We calculate an average of the judges’ scores to produce the ranking in each category. This gives us the country and regional Awards winners.

 

For the themed, bronze, silver and gold awards, if the result is too close to call, we will call a second stage of judging that invites members of each judging panel to join a discussion on the results of the first round of judging of the relevant category. The judges may revise their score during or after the discussion. If need be, we then recalculate the averages and agree the winners. We will call a debate by default for the European Pension Fund of the Year category, regardless of the result of the first round of judging. If there are pension funds with equal top score after both stages, IPE is happy to present the award to both as joint winners.

 

It is inevitable in a business such as ours that conflicts of interest can occur during judging. We are confident that our judges act with honesty and integrity to ensure any conflicts of interest do not influence their views. Were a serious conflict to emerge, however, a judge may excuse him or herself from judging a particular entry. In this instance, we add an average of the other judges' scores as the confliected judge's score.

 

The judges’ views are final. IPE does not permit or accept any correspondence or contact between the judges and entrants and/or sponsors.