Standard claims the moral high ground!

m_c_s

Another interesting article about Standard Life....I wonder if we have been scre...ed!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/06/28/cmcomp28.xml&menuId=244&sSheet=/money/2006/06/29/ixcoms.html

Milarky

I'm amazed that the Telegraph also had a table of 'who gets what' on 22nd April - when as far as I know Standard Life never published any explict formula governing share allocation. It even seems to show that they (SL) have actuarily given a few less shares to men rather than women!

MarkyMarkD

Of course they've given fewer shares to men than women, who paid the same premium.

That's because the life assurance element of the policy cost is higher for men, as they die younger. So the investment element of the policy cost is higher for women, and it's the investment element on which the number of shares is calculated.

Milarky

That's their logic of course. I think I understand now! The male party's policy would have a slightly lower quoted value at all times than a female party's paying the same premium. Thus they did not make this distinction because they saw a particular policy belonged to a man or a woman - just what each policy was valued at and how long it had been held. To present the information in that form in the Telegraph they must have used additional knowledge about these typical policy value differences which I imagine SL supplied on request. Even so it would have been nice to have been treated a bit more grown up by the company and for them to have included the 'Value-time' formula used to calculate individual entitlements in the letters of notication in April. If a mistake has been made in their case, the policyholder won't know that it has because he/she cannot refer to what that number 'should' be with any confidence.