Don't use Hargreaves Lansdown

As I recall, the PTS providing the advice on my DB transfer had to undertake a comparison as part of the recommendation. My report included a comparison between the future benefits of my DB against the possible outcome of the receiving self-invested scheme. In order to assess this the PTS needed to know specifics - e.g. my attitude to risk, the name of the receiving platform and my initial choice of funds.

This comparison formed part of the justification for his recommendation, positive in my case

OP: on what basis did your two PTSs make this comparison? Did you, or they, assume/specify that HL/ANOther would be the destination platform? Likewise, did you specify which funds? Or was part of their brief to recommend the recipient funds?

I am interested in knowing why the two IFAs involved in your case reached such different conclusions. HL, on the one hand, were prepared to lose your business rather than recommend a DB transfer or accept you as an insistent client, whilst the second IFA 'enthusiastically' recommended a transfer.

Did your circumstances change? Did any specifics change in the brief (other than the replacement of HL as the recipient platform)?

The regulator takes the view that IFAs should assume a default of a negative recommendation. Presumably, therefore, a positive recommendation must be justified by compelling circumstances and evidence in order to protect the IFA against future compensation claims.

Upthread I have listed a few of the reasons why my recommendation was positive. For the benefit of others considering a transfer, are you able to tell us, in general terms, the reasons given by the first PTS to recommend against, and the reasons why the second PTS was so 'enthusiastic'?

ZingPowZing wrote: »

."Despite this, too much advice is not of an acceptable standard. When we published our last update on this in December 2018 we were clear that our targeted work had found advice was suitable in fewer than 50% of cases; this was not acceptable and standards must be improved.

Some might say that this makes you the perfect illustration of the DB advice market. One IFA said one thing and one said the opposite. Therefore 50% of the advice you received must have been unsuitable.

This is of course BS and they would be wrong. As I said above there are hundreds of borderline cases in DB transfer advice, and any half-decent IFA with a little imagination could write a perfectly compliant recommendation to transfer and a perfectly compliant one not to. Both recommendations would be counted towards the <50% of suitable recommendations. In the absence of the files of both HL and your more accommodating IFA, it is perfectly possible that both recommendations were suitable.

You would hope that the current % (i.e. looking at say recommendations in 2019 only) is a bit higher than 50%, following the FCA's cracking down on the bucket shops and the fact that most of the potential suckers have already been scammed. The total % of suitable advice (e.g. recommendations across 2014-2019) will take longer to be dragged up.

As I have said elsewhere, most IFAs give suitable advice in 99% of cases, and a tiny handful of scammers give unsuitable advice in 100% of cases. Looking at the average between both groups is a bit like trying to draw conclusions from the average height of a group of basketball players and jockeys.

Because a DB transfer is a missale until proven otherwise, there is a very low number of people getting advice in relation to defined benefit schemes (compared to vanilla investment or pension recommendations). The vast majority of people who stay in defined benefit schemes won't ever take regulated advice to tell them they should.

ZingPowZing wrote: »

Bottom line is, nobody gets sued for telling you to do nothing.

Except IFAs if it's unsuitable advice to do nothing.

This is why numerous IFAs are withdrawing from the DB transfer market entirely, because of the risk that they tell someone to do nothing, and then they die and their children complain to the Ombudsman that the adviser has screwed them out of the hundreds of thousands they'd've pocketed if da had taken the CETV. The fact that telling da to take the CETV would have been a missale in 9 out of 10 cases is unlikely to deter them or their ambulance chaser.

And that is the flaw in the regulation that compels a client to buy advice.

Not really as if you receive regulated advice to do nothing, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from transferring to one of the providers that accept insistent clients. That is the bottom line.

Blackbeard_of_Perranporth wrote:

I’m bored now because there is nothing new here!

Correct, there isn't.