Pension with Scottish Widows Consensus fund

Loughton_Monkey

xylophone wrote: »

Pore over the information in Trustnet?:)

... forgive my pore English!:rotfl:

Loughton_Monkey

dunstonh wrote: »

.....No insurance company has thrived under bank ownership....

You can say that again!!!!

I enjoyed virtually all of my financial career, but a short spell as a director of a bank-owned Life Insurance company was the most stressful and bitter period of my life. Banks do not understand insurance. Some typical examples.....

(a) We can all understand that a bank teller would possibly need to 'close the till' and refer upwards when paying out (say) £10,000 in cash over the counter. But in a big life insurance company, young clerks [with experience of course] can regularly pay out (say) £30K on a simple death claim. There is a death certificate, probate, and an obvious natural death years after taking out the policy, so operational risk is virtually zero. But the bank auditors are ignorant of all this and impose the most laborious, bureacratic, nonsensical procedures simply on the basis of amount.....

(b) For investment life insurance products, the fund is obviously managed by 'bank' people, not the insurance company. We had monthly 'liaison meetings' with the fund managers - primarily to review performance and give feedback on what the customers were saying. The fund managers' eyes would glaze over at any suggestion that 4th quartile performance generates a lot of complaints from policyholders. It was simply something we should 'deal with'. They would bring their own agenda, which was always to do with new funds, or new 'structured products' they were planning - and boasting about the huge commissions to be obtained from the complex financial instruments.....

The 'old school tie' seems never to have died within banks. They considered Insurance Companies a necessary, but 'sleazy' add-on... Just as (perhaps) a large property developer might consider bricklayers, plasterers, and electricians the scum of the earth.