Endowment update: payouts still falling

Mr_helpful

This is the same Pearl that undertook a review of sales from 1997-2001 due to the highlevels of churning and inappropriate advice.

Yes and churning is one of the few genuine miss sells however I didnt and have never had a claim upheld against me plus it doesnt get away from the fact that all your beloved newspapers whose financial columns you believe as if gospel were saying Pearls with profits were the best thing since sliced bread. And that included the authoritive money management as edinvestor calls it. Why are you not going after the Mail, express, telegraph, times, sun etc for bad advice?

Did the Standard life policyholders realise that a significant chunk of the with profits fund would be used to fund the costs of the pensions and more recently endowment reviews.


Did anyone? did anyone know the stockmarket would halve its value? Did the manufacturers of chelsea tractors know Gordon Brown was going to tax them at £400. That is not grounds to say something was miss sold

Financial services is still an industry where it is possible to advice on almost any form of policy or investment based on the qualification equivalent of a GCSE


True but then a gcse or two will get you started in the majority of jobs.

Edinvestor
you spend most of your time moaning about lack of equities in with profits funds yet when an insurer forgets to move from equities to bonds you moan as well. Endowments were doing perfectly well until the regulaters stepped in perhaps you should blame them

dunstonh

This is the same Pearl that undertook a review of sales from 1997-2001 due to the highlevels of churning and inappropriate advice.

Pearl were notorious for churning. It is a bit of irony that I spend a lot of time now "switching" Pearl plans into something better (i have 5 ex Pearl advisers as introducers). Pearl can be used as the example of failure in so many areas. I wonder how many boats were actually bought with the money from the saverplans that were set up to buy "e.g. boat". However, we can see that now. No-one was querying it at the time. The regulator knew the Pearl sales process. It matched most others. It was just how it was at that time.

There are a couple of things to note.

1 - Financial services never saw the compensation culture coming and didnt plan for it by covering their backsides. Missing documentation or not enough risk warnings in the reason why letter is the most common reason for payouts. Not incorrect advice. Yes you can blame the firms for not keeping the documents are not encouraging quality reports but that has also encouraged the "have a go, it doesnt cost you anything and you have nothing to lose" complaints where the advice was fine but you are hoping for the paperwork to be poor.
2 - Expensive and/or poor quality products are not mis-sales. They exist in every retail area and you shouldnt expect financial services to be any different.
3 - We have the benefit of hindsight. Things change and we can see the issues now but they did not exist in the past.
4 - Standards are higher today but so is the information available. I still have to pay many thousands of pounds a year for software (currently looking at one that will cost another £5000 a year). However, that sort of data just wasnt available in the past.

EdInvestor

dunstonh wrote: »

Financial services never saw the compensation culture coming and didnt plan for it by covering their backsides.

I always laugh when the financial services industry refers to the "compensation culture."It betrays their outrage at the beginning of the end of the misselling gravy train.

It seems they thought it would go on forever, because the mug punters were too thick to figure out what was being done to them.

Just shows it never pays to believe your own propaganda.

Mr_helpful

you are forever quoting the Newspapers is that not propaganda?

jamesd

EdInvestor, please say more about why you believe that dunstonh is unhappy about losing access to a mis-selling gravy train. You might instead prefer to clarify that it wasn't dunstonh you were referring to.

Mr_helpful

EdInvestor wrote: »

I always laugh when the financial services industry refers to the "compensation culture."It betrays their outrage at the beginning of the end of the misselling gravy train.

It seems they thought it would go on forever, because the mug punters were too thick to figure out what was being done to them.

Just shows it never pays to believe your own propaganda.

You really do like the sweeping generalisation dont you? Now you are insulting people who bought endowments calling them "thick" and "Mug Punters"
Endowments had been sold for many years without many complaints. People had renwed what was often a good savings product and all of a sudden people are mug punters. Full cost endowments have never failed at maturity and low cost enowments gave good returns for many years so why was it right to think they were being mis sold?
It was only in the 90s that we started a sustained period of low inflation and a later stockmarket correction so that policies fell seriously behind that all of a sudden everyone has been miss sold. poeople have blatently been jumping on the "I was mis sold" gravy train
They may in your eyes be mug punters and not have any financial knowledge but they sure know when theres an opportunity to fiddle a company and drag a salesmans reputation down the drain

toonfish

Mr_helpful wrote: »

They may in your eyes be mug punters and not have any financial knowledge but they sure know when theres an opportunity to fiddle a company and drag a salesmans reputation down the drain

worse that that, there are companies making a "living" out of these frivolous, unsubstantiated claims. They are the real parasites.

they then mug the poor client for a chunk of the "compensation"

Mr_helpful

toonfish wrote: »

worse that that, there are companies making a "living" out of these frivolous, unsubstantiated claims. They are the real parasites.

they then mug the poor client for a chunk of the "compensation"

Spot on

Just as bad theres the TEP companies luring people to sell and making a nice profit on people fears and mis information. There are those who promote the selling of policies on this forum without exercising due care and diligence

toonfish

Mr_helpful wrote: »

Spot on

Just as bad theres the TEP companies luring people to sell and making a nice profit on people fears and mis information. There are those who promote the selling of policies on this forum without exercising due care and diligence

lure them to sell their "shoddy" policies, then sell them on at a premium to more clued up investors!

EdInvestor

lure them to sell their "shoddy" policies, then sell them on at a premium to more clued up investors!

You mean the Germans? Call them clued up? :rotfl:

They don't even have a decent property market.

They think a 6% return is whizz hot.