The Pensions industry is in the 19th century!

Standy

My pension investments WERE managed by Brewin Dolphin and resident in a Scottish Widows pension wrapper. I instructed BD/SW to sell my investments and start again with Alliance Trust Savings with a new IFA. I was also wishing to take a drawdown and as my IFA from the BD days wanted 3% fee for any drawdown, I was advised to wait and take the drawdown from ATS when the transfer was effected. I signed the necessary forms to do this on April 9th and my new IFA sent them off. I imagined I would see some cash in April - WRONG!
The BD online assets were liquidated by April 28th. Apparently, whilst the online account SAID my pension pots were all cash, BD were awaiting settlement - I imagine several horseman bringing payment from far away places. I chased them up and eventually by May 11th, they sent the money to SW - whereupon NOTHING HAPPENED! I phoned on May 17th and got some stuff about 'Service Level Agreements' (SLAs) and they would take 6 days to transfer MY money out to ATS. On May 23rd, the funds duly arrived at ATS. As of today, they are still all cash - I have been out of the market already for around 6 weeks. ATS require a final confirmation letter from SW to do with drawdowns and tax and without it they cannot do anything. ATS have emailed SW twice, SW have NO record of any emails! SW say they sent said letter (which my IFA says should form part of the electronic pension transfer system providers use) on May 17th but ATS say they have never had a letter. I was told it would be guaranteed that a replacement letter would arrive (from Glasgow to Dundee) in TWELVE DAYS:mad:. For some reason, I reacted to this as I was incredulous at the complete disinterest all along from BD & SW to quickly transfer my money to ATS. How can bank accounts and STOs & DDs be transferred in a week and it is coming up to 2 months since I signed the forms and I still have no pension invested and no drawdown? I have no expectation that the Ombudsman would be any use as I was told they have 90 days to do things. This is even worse than transferring energy suppliers (thanks MSE for the steer :beer:) and the industry needs dragging into the 21st Century and stop hanging on to MY money for the sole benefit of themselves - just imagine standing by an ATM for 2 months waiting for cash to appear.....

bigadaj

Why is your new ifa staying with the Scottish widows wrapper, ther must be better options out there?

zagfles

bigadaj wrote: »

Why is your new ifa staying with the Scottish widows wrapper, ther must be better options out there?

I read it that the OP is transferring out of SW to ATS.

zagfles

You''l likely find ATS, like most SIPP providers, a breath of fresh air compared to old fashioned providers who still think it's the 19th century.

dunstonh

SW say they sent said letter (which my IFA says should form part of the electronic pension transfer system providers use) on May 17th but ATS say they have never had a letter.

The OPTIONS system is paperless. However, both sides need to be using the system for it to work. Scottish Widows use it on the original Scottish Widows branded products but do not use it ex Lloyds Bank group branded plans. I don't know if Alliance Trust use it as I have never used them. And i won't be now as they are under strategic review and that usually means they are selling up. Most platforms are loss making. Even the profitable ones are not making much. Alliance have said the review is to look at a course of action which the company might choose to take for the benefit of shareholders. In other words, they suspect they can do more with the money from a sale than keeping it. They have also been approached for a merger with another investment trust company.

The details sent with options system would include the detail ATS are looking for. The fact ATS want it in writing suggests they are not using the options system. So, that makes it a manual task for SW. So, something that would be sent on a press of a button turns into a much slower process.

ATS have emailed SW twice, SW have NO record of any emails!

ATS should know better than to try to use emails.

How can bank accounts and STOs & DDs be transferred in a week and it is coming up to 2 months since I signed the forms and I still have no pension invested and no drawdown?

Modern pensions are built with flexibility in mind and arranged with current laws. Legacy pensions were built with old hard coded software with no flexibility in mind (as before the late 90s, people rarely moved their pensions) and with laws that were different to now. Some of those plans retain the benefit of old laws. So, when a plan gets transferred over, it requires a fair bit of information to go across with it. Nothing that is actually that difficult but unless you have a modern computer system, it is actually quite a manual task. Insurance companies are not good at doing manual tasks quickly. However, there are some "newer" pension companies that have quite poor software too. That sounds like it may bet he case here with ATS not accepting the electronic method, which ironically, the older insurer (who is massively underfunded from Lloyds) do support.