Aegon Pensions

grooverly

Hi, I've recently dug out an old pension that I paid into 10 years ago (including employer contributions). My pot has grown by approx 5% year on year, with no further payments for 10 years. having contacted Aegon they are encouraging me to transfer to an on-line platform, I'm presuming more cost-efficient for them to run, but underpinned by a new fund (Black Rock Funds) which was only set up March last year. Whilst the lure of a slightly lower admin fee and good on-line portal seems tempting, I am wary about transferring over my pension pot to a fund which has been running for a very short amount of time, on which there is no track record. Should I be right to be cautious or should I trust Aegon as one of the UK's biggest pension providers? I have tried to look at the stock exchange for more evidence/insight but inexperienced in this field and found it completely bewildering. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you.

dunstonh

having contacted Aegon they are encouraging me to transfer to an on-line platform

I was talking to another IFA recently and he was livid at the way Aegon were encouraging one of his clients to move from one of their older plans to the platform. Especially when you consider the amount of compliance an IFA has to go through to do a pension switch. He was saying that the old Aegon plan was better for the individual than the new one and it was not in client interests but they were still pushing.

should I trust Aegon as one of the UK's biggest pension providers?

Aegon are not very popular at the moment in the advice community. They are actively trying to get people off advice onto self directed via Aegon. Remember the provider is not there to give you advice or act in your best interests.

jamesd

You won't have to pick just one fund or that fund, though Blackrock run a wide range of funds and it's probably just a new flavour of an existing one, perhaps one that doesn't pay an advisor commission and so has a 0.75% lower annual charge as a result.

Whether you should switch depends on the range of investments you want, the charges for those investments in each and whether you want to continue paying your adviser the 0.5% commission that you're probably paying them via the funds. Or more, depends on what you agreed. Or less. if you were to move it'd switch to explicit fees for any advice you wanted though that could still be set as a percentage of the pot size.

One of the things that Aegon has been doing is contacting their customers whenever the IFA hasn't been seen on their systems checking on an account for the last year. Presumably they take that to indicate that the IFA is not providing ongoing servicing and that their customer might be better off no longer paying the IFA for a service that they are not actually getting. So if their customer agrees, Aegon would stop paying the IFA the commission for no ongoing work.

If your total cots are lower and you're not receiving anything from the IFA I suggest that you switch and leave the money in the funds that you're happy with, or the reduced annual charge equivalents that Aegon would offer you these days.

When it comes to IFAs use a little caution. When providers do things like this some advisers take the view that the customer isn't the customer of the platform like Aegon but theirs exclusively and can suggest in conversations with other IFAs just not sending business to the firm to try to punish them, without necessarily considering whether it's the best option for the consumer, who is actually the customer of both firms.

dunstonh

When it comes to IFAs use a little caution. When providers do things like this some advisers take the view that the customer isn't the customer of the platform like Aegon but theirs exclusively and can suggest in conversations with other IFAs just not sending business to the firm to try to punish them, without necessarily considering whether it's the best option for the consumer, who is actually the customer of both firms.

The caution needs to be the other way around. A lot of Aegon's legacy contracts are perfectly suitable for the individual concerned. Many IFAs never visit the Aegon website to download client details as its fed directly from Aegon to the adviser back office system. The IFA then works from their own system. They never make a phone call to Aegon about the client as they dont need to. Aegon has no way of knowing what the adviser contact is. However, Aegon currently has it's sales reps actively encouraging a move to their platform.

However, in this case, there does not seem to be an adviser involved. So, its not the thread to offer opinion about advisers. The fact is that the provider is selling their product and doesn't have the client best interests at heart. It has it's own interests at heart. An adviser would need to do a cost and benefits comparison and present the pros and cons to the client. Aegon doesn't have to do that when moving between it's own products.

jamesd

Given that these were contributions to an employer scheme it seems likely that there was an adviser involved but that they were providing no ongoing servicing.

This is somewhat moot for grooverly unless there was an adviser and hey want to try to recover the commission paid without ongoing service, if there was ever such commission. The main issue for grooverly is the usual combination of investments, costs and customer service.

purplelavender

I have a current stakeholder pension with Aegon, when I contacted them about 3 weeks ago regarding info on transfers they actively encouraged me to look at Retiready website. Now I have a v little knowledge about pensions (I am trying to improve this) and so I said I needed time to find out more. So today I finally started looking at it. I had a few questions and called Aegon. Interestingly the advisor was not so pushy this time. He could not say whether I should keep existing pension or move it into the Retiready pension. I remain confused about what is best for me. It is not alot of money 10K and I am only contributing £80 pm. I didn't find the Retiready website or advisor helpful really!