Pension release,who,where to ask

DaveMcG

agarnett wrote: »

If the industry keeps on producing "reorganisations" that place the existing long term contracts held by consumers in jeopardy, isn't it time the industry were forced by the government to allow consumers to unpick bad deals and take back their cash without deduction ?

Could you be more vague?

agarnett

DaveMcG wrote: »

Could you be more vague?

As vague as the industry re-organisers, perhaps? That's very much how the industry likes it. Let's look at the "re-organisations" conducted by just two of the major players in pensions over the past 15 years:

Aviva is merging with Friends Life.

Together they are currently "trusted" with long-term products for some 16 million of us - most of it "back books". There's very little profit in new business - easier to plunder what you've already got.

They have been constantly acquiring/merging/re-organising market entities and using that as a big excuse for changing and merging funds to suit their own agenda - no-one else's.

If you wind back the transactions of those 16 million long term investment product-holders, or policyholders, to Day One of their contracts how many different provider names will be found on the original contract/policy documents?

Let me give you a starter for ten:

Would their current contracts have originally have been sold by:

1. Equity and Law or,
2. Sun Life, or
3. AXA, or
4. AXA Sun Life, or
5. AXA Equity and Law, or
6. Morley, or
7. Commercial Union Life, or
8. General Accident Life, or
9. Norwich Union, or
10. Aviva

Actually there are far more than ten, and those are just the separate brand names - each brand name spawns a whole host of limited companies with which you'll be very lucky to deduce from correspondence exactly which it is that is responsible for executing your contract.

Take Friends Life for example in its current guises - might you be dealing with Friends Life Services Ltd 3424940, or Friends Life Ltd 4096141 or Friends Life Assurance Society 776273 ? And if you can identify which it is you do deal with today, well done, but which of them might it have been three years ago? And why might it have changed ? And before that ? You don't know ? Do keep up!

And which other original brand name policyholders absorbed into AXA/Resolution Life/Friends Life are now in the self same funds as you? And how might their contracts and agendas have been different to yours? So who said it was fair to lump us all together in one railway truck and take us God knows where?

Is that vague enough for you, Dave?

It is time someone put a stop to the industry nonsense and the industry should be made to pay dearly for what it has been doing, and recompense be forced out of the chief protagonists, among whom I finger the directors behind the juggernauts currently named Friends Life and Aviva.