Our funds

A defined contribution scheme is a long-term savings plan that allows Schroders to pay money into your individual account – along with any additional contributions you choose to make – to be invested so it can grow over time. The performance of your investments when you’re saving will impact the level of income you receive when you retire, so it’s important that you have different investment options to consider. By choosing from a range of funds you can decide if you want to aim for maximising growth or minimising risk, depending on your desired outcomes.  

Some examples of risk include: 

• Market risk is the risk that the value of your investments will fall due to market conditions and events. It’s what most of us think of when we think of ‘risk’. This is particularly important to consider as you approach retirement.
• Volatility risk relates to how often and how sharply the market price of an investment goes up or down.
• Inflation risk occurs when your investment growth could be lower than the pace of inflation, so the purchasing power of your investments falls (i.e. it can buy less in the future than it can now).

Remember... investments can go down as well as up.

You can let us invest your savings on your behalf in what’s known as the ‘default’ or you can choose the funds you invest in yourself (known as self-select).

If you’d prefer a ready-made investment strategy, or don’t tell us where you’d like your savings to be invested, they’ll be automatically invested in the default option called the 'SRBS Default Drawdown Investment Strategy’. It operates on the assumption that your retirement age is 60 – unless you select a different retirement age.  

This investment strategy allocates your savings to different investments throughout the different stages of your working career. Early on there’s more exposure to equities to try and maximise growth, but this reduces over time to reduce risk as you approach your retirement age. The graph below shows how the assets are allocated over time in our default option. 

If you want to choose your own funds you can select from a range that invest in different asset classes, such as equities, gilts, bonds and property. You can decide to allocate your savings across any one or more of these. The available funds are shown in the table below. You’ll see that they’re a mix of active and passive managed funds. Active managed means that an investment management approach is taken where a portfolio manager aims to beat the market through research, analysis and their own judgement. Passive managed means that the investment management style aims to replicate the performance of a market or index.