Continuing low interest rates are encouraging pension funds to look for new strategies for liability hedging, according to Royal Bank of Scotland, which says it is selling new strategies using interest and inflation swaps, or swaptions, at an unprecedented pace.

Sinead Leahy, head of UK pension solutions at RBS, said the bank has sold more of these hedging deals in the first quarter of 2013 than it did in the whole of 2012 ̶ the highest ever sales for these products in a quarter for the bank, amounting to "several billions of pounds" of pensions liabilities covered.