Advice on trail commission reclaim please!

Bill_Parish

Maggpiecottage should re-read my comments.
I'm only talking about punters who have had trail commission taken out of their investment for no support/advice in return from their adviser.

dunstonh

The financial services always claimed that trail commission was there for the financial adviser to "look after" the client, ie, to keep an eye on the client's investment.

Actually, the industry never made such claims and trail was not introduced for that reason. However, over time, a number of firms did use it to allow the provision of services to be paid for via that method.

If they have been paid and done no work for it, the commission should be refunded. Trading Standards and the courts regularly prosecute rogue traders who effectively pull the same scam.

If you have a fee agreement that states that work was agreed that has not been carried out then by all means take action. Although using the free of charge complaints service would be better. If you have no fee agreement then you have no contract for what you are claiming.

The bottom line is why is the FSA stopping commission, and more importantly why did it take so long to do so?

The FSA is stopping commission because it doesnt like it. However, most products have been explicitly charged for years (many the best part of a decade). So, the industry was ahead of the FSA.

There are also consequences to this stopping of commission. The current system is a cross subsidy system. People with small amounts can get service they will not get when commission is banned. People with medium sized amounts will largely pay the same. People with large amounts will pay less.

RitaSouthend

sarahjaneedwards wrote: »

Also, not sure if I'm allowed to post links as a newbie, but the main guys are:

investsmartuk.co.uk
paymemy.com/mission/
commfreefunds.com

There's also a new service Sarah - commission-cleanser.com who give 100% back in return for a simple set-up fee of £95. The service you're getting takes 50% of your cash and when you think that a typical commission rebate on a pension (according to their calculator) is about £87,000, you're paying £43,405 too much!

dunstonh

RitaSouthend wrote: »

There's also a new service Sarah - commission-cleanser.com who give 100% back in return for a simple set-up fee of £95. The service you're getting takes 50% of your cash and when you think that a typical commission rebate on a pension (according to their calculator) is about £87,000, you're paying £43,405 too much!

Problem is that those calculators are complete and utter rubbish. The vast majority of pensions pay no trail for example. So, you end up paying £95 to get nothing back.

I have a number of legacy pensions on my books which dont pay a penny but the few that do are typically figures under 50p per month. Also, HMRC treat commission rebates on pensions as unauthorised payments and subject to penalty tax.

usually the easiest thing to do if you dont have a servicing adviser and your contract contains trail commission is to transfer it to a provider that doesnt. That way you get all the money and not some of it or end up paying more than you get back.