What's in a name
Frank Redington's Immunisation Theory states that duration matching of assets and liabilities is the best way to protect against changes in interest rates.
About Frank Redington
Born in Leeds in 1906, Frank Redington studied mathematics as a scholar at Cambridge. He joined the Prudential in 1928, where he remained for the whole of his working life, becoming their Chief Actuary from 1951 until his retirement in 1968.
Frank Redington is most famous for his development of Immunisation Theory, which states that duration matching of assets and liabilities is the best way to protect against changes in interest rates He went on to become the President of the Institute of Actuaries and the Life Offices Association (LOA) and received the Institute’s Gold Medal in 1968.
In 1952, he published a paper entitled 'A Ramble through the Actuarial Countryside'. It was in this seminal work that Frank Redington first introduced the concept of liability immunisation. He was over fifty years ahead of his time, in that no pension scheme immunised themselves against their liability risk until Friends Provident, in 2003. His theories now form the cornerstone of pension scheme risk management.
Like Redington Ltd, Frank Redington was known for challenging the accepted norms of the day. In his Presidential Address at Staples Inn (1958) he said 'The times have passed… when it was felt necessary for our profession to hide behind a cloak of mystery and infallibility'.
For his work, we think Frank Redington deserves a statue in Trafalgar Square. In the meantime, we have named our company after him.
The word 'matching' implies the distribution of assets to make them as far as possible equally as vulnerable as the liabilities to those influences which affect both. This implies the distribution of the term of the assets, in relation to the term of the liabilities, in such a way as to reduce the possibility of loss arising from a change in interest rates.
Frank Redington (28th April 1952)