Victoria Mance joins as client director in London from the law firm CMS, where she spent over 20 years in the pensions team advising schemes, employers and providers. Her pension advisory work has included ongoing valuation and contingent asset support discussions, complex investments, changes to benefit design, equalisation challenges, handling Ombudsman complaints, liability management, employer debt and Pension Protection Fund (PPF) entry scenarios, scheme end game planning, buy-ins and buyouts.
Victoria recently spent time on secondment to the legal team at the Pension Protection Fund. Previously, she worked at Baker & McKenzie LLP, where she advised a range of clients and spent time on secondment with The Pensions Regulator and the Department for Work and Pensions.
Azka Ali joins as a client director in Birmingham to provide professional trustee services to clients. Azka joins from Mercer where she spent 15 years in various roles. Her most recent role was as a scheme actuary advising trustees. She also completed a nine-month Mercer secondment with the World Economic Forum in 2022/23. Azka is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and was named ‘Mentor of the Year; at the Professional Pensions Rising Star Awards in 2020.
Also in Birmingham, Shaun Kilcoyne joins as a client director. bringing over 25 years’ pensions experience in trustee support, corporate facing and consulting roles. His recent experience includes journey planning, de-risking and helping schemes progress towards their long-term strategic goals.
Shaun worked at Smiths Group plc, the FTSE 100 engineering group for over 17 years where he was head of pensions with responsibility for the Group’s strategy in respect of approximately £4bn of pension liabilities. He also worked in-house at Alliance & Leicester plc, and within the pension consultancy groups of two of the big four accountancy practices, Deloitte and KPMG. He is an Associate of the Pensions Management Institute (APMI) and an accredited member of the Association of Professional Pension Trustees (APPT).
Vidett also welcomes Lucy Loughborough who joins the business development team as Bid Associate from Just Group, where she was a business analyst managing new business deals and Sam Karavis, who joins as Technology and Data trainee from Experian, where he worked as a digital analyst intern, before becoming a business analyst.
Naomi L’Estrange, Co-Chief Executive at Vidett, stated: “Vidett is expanding significantly, and we are delighted to welcome five new joiners, including three new client directors, who bring great knowledge and expertise to enhance our services. We know they will play a vital part in our growth and development and wish them every success in their new roles.”
Vidett is a privately owned business, independent from any other provider of services to corporate pension and employee benefit schemes. With an unrivalled knowledge bank to support client needs, Vidett currently looks after over 475 clients with total assets in excess of £142bn and over 2.5 million scheme members.