Our aim is to help you – our members – to achieve your goals in retirement. That could be spending more quality time with family and friends, taking regular holidays or using your extra time to take on a home renovation project.

But we also want to make sure that, as you save for retirement, you can invest your money in the things that are important to you – and that may be a better fit with your personal beliefs.

As part of this approach, we have launched a new defined contribution (DC) self-select fund – the TPT Islamic Global Equity Fund – available to you now.

What’s a self-select fund?

If you’d like to be more involved in the way your pension savings are invested, we have a range of self-select funds to choose from. Our self-select funds have been carefully selected by our investment experts, and include global equity, property and ethical equity funds – as well as the new Islamic Global Equity Fund. You can find out more about the self-select funds, and how they compare to the target date fund (TDF) where your savings are automatically invested when you join, here.

The new fund is invested in a way that meets Islamic finance investment principles and complies with Sharia law, including its:

• ban on interest (Riba);
• ban on uncertainty/transactions involving uncertainty/risk (Gharar);
• ban on speculation/gambling (Maisir);
• risk-sharing and profit-sharing principles: both parties in a financial transaction must share the associated risks and profits; and
• ethical investment approach: investment in industries that are prohibited by the Quran (such as alcohol, pornography, gambling and pork-based products) is discouraged.

As with our other funds, an annual management charge (AMC) will be taken from the value of your savings each year, to cover the costs of running the pension scheme and investing your savings. For the Islamic Global Equity Fund, the AMC is 0.45%.

You’ll be able to find full details of the fund, including its investment performance, in its fund fact sheet, available here from November.

If you decide that you’d like to move your savings into the Islamic Global Equity Fund, or any of our self-select funds, you’ll need to tell us within your Retirement Savings Account.

Risk and reward

It’s important to remember that all of the funds available to you can go down as well as up, and making any changes can impact your level of income in later life. You should read about the differences between risk and reward and consider taking financial advice before making any investment selections.