Standard Life to relaunch personal pension
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Standard Life is preparing to relaunch a personal pension product to sit alongside its active money Sipp and plans to steal significant market share from main players Aviva, Aegon and Scottish Widows.
Standard Life effectively pulled out of the personal pension market about five years ago when it launched its Sipp. It still has a product but it is not actively marketed and as such its market share has dropped to around 4 per cent.
But the firm believes there are lucrative opportunities to be had. The active money personal pension will launch in February alongside a hefty consumer marketing campaign. It will begin advertising in the trades this week.
The product is aimed at young and successful singles or families aged between 25 and 40 earning over £40,000 a year. The target market will also own their own home with a mortgage and are likely to have at least one child under the age of 15.
The firm says customers will be able to move seamlessly from the personal pension into the Sipp if they choose. The personal pension costs 0.5 per cent and offers more than 150 funds.
Standard Life is also keen to develop a specialist Sipp to compete more fiercely with the specialist Sipp providers. It plans to consult on what this would look like with IFAs although generally it would be targeted to high net worth business owners or professionals in their late 40s, 50s and older.
It will offer complete tax and estate planning services and use a range of professional services. The firm says it is also likely to offer a wider range of investments.
Head of communications Mark Polson says: “As we are coming up to five years since the launch of our Sipp, it seemed a good time to review our pension range generally. After speaking to advisers and customers, we have concluded that it is the right time to stretch our proposition both up and down market.
“The active money personal pension is a low-cost, easy to use plan that can trade up seamlessly to Sipp functionality as and when required. It has been developed with advisers and compliance officers to ensure it meets their needs.
“We never enter a market unless we think we can play a big part in it. It has been five years since we were in the PP space and we think the time is right to rejoin.”
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Readers' comments (14)
Michael Schult | 7 Dec 2009 8:07 am
Although I like Standard Life as a brand, some of the decisions taken are difficult to follow, not from a profit position but from keeping up relationships. Effectively withdrawing from personal pensions was one. The wind has now changed, someone different is there so let's go back to PPP's
Do you know if you are in a Group PPP/SIPP with Standard Life, although you can transfer protected rights balances to the plan, even if you wanted to you cannot continue to contract out at the same time? The result 2 plans with 2 different charging structures! Another strange decision!
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Dathan Steele | 7 Dec 2009 9:22 am
Hmm
'Standard Life is also keen to develop a specialist Sipp to compete more fiercely with the specialist Sipp providers...'
What a load of rubbish. The SL 'SIPP' is not actually a SIPP at all, its a PPP in all but name. Life offices are not interested in having physical property or anything else in their pension wrappers that are not 'insured funds' as they do not add to AUM and therefore the ability to cream off AMCs.
Obviously there is a debate as to what constitutes a 'SIPP'. If you take it to extremes, then there are about 4 SIPPs in operation in the UK. Hornbuckles have a phrase about allowing anything the HMRC allows. Now no life office is going to do this, given that they operate on a master trust basis so they need to be cautious in the extreme, as a wrong decision could lead to all sorts of aggro for everyone in the master trust.
So if you want to do something clever in a SIPP, maybe concerning property or unquoted shares, are you really going to go to SL/L&G etc who will probably not know much about what you want to do, or would you go to Hornbuckles, Dentons etc?
Anyway, all the churning of PPP's into 'SIPPs' which has been encouraged by the life offices is a timebomb waiting to happen. RU64, anyone??
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Phil Castle | 7 Dec 2009 9:31 am
I agree with Dathan. Any of my clients who have an insurance company SIPP have been "sold" it as a PPP with a SIPP option and NOT as a SIPP.
RU64 has not gone away and selling something as a SIPP when a client is never going to make use of the SIPP option is a complaint waiting to happen....
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Evan Owen | 7 Dec 2009 10:01 am
When is the regulator going to lift the bonnet of this car made of jelly?
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Anonymous | 7 Dec 2009 10:13 am
Clearly the last comment demonstrates the lack of knowledge in the SIPP market. Standard Life currently operate's in the pure sipp marketplace and has over 1000 properties held within its sipp product. It is not a personal pension as suggested by Dathan Steele hence the reason why they are launching a personal pension contract.
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Phil Castle | 7 Dec 2009 10:52 am
To Anon. If you are going to criticise Dathan (I don't always agree with him), then at least have the balls to post using your own name so we can be aware of your own shortcomings and criticise you too.
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Julian Stevens | 7 Dec 2009 11:09 am
The only thing Standard Life could do to encourage me to place any business with them ever again is to undo and compensate me for the changes they unilaterally imposed w.e.f. 6th April 2001 on all the PP's we wrote with them throughout the 90's. They didn't even give us prior notice or an explanation, let alone ask our permission.
So, Standard Life, don't bother getting one of your consultants to phone this particular practice trying to drum up some fresh interest in any of your products. They'll be summarily rebuffed.
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Neil F Liversidge | 7 Dec 2009 11:49 am
All I can say is that I have used Standard Life for SIPP property purchases and have found them absolutely excellent in every regard. Their staff could not have been more efficient of helpful. One case was finalised by me whilst i was on holiday, by phone to their Edinburgh office from the top of the Kehlstein mountain in Bavaria where Adolf used to hang out!
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Phil Castle | 7 Dec 2009 11:59 am
Neil, the irony of that is that under MIFId unless you have a mifid passport, you administered "cross borders" by finalising whilst in Bavaria and hence you may have committed a criminal offence!
Personally I don't think you did anything wrong, but I say this just to demonstrate how stupid some of the FSA and EU rulea actually are....
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Neil F Liversidge | 7 Dec 2009 12:08 pm
Mea culpa - I'd not thought of that Phil. I'll go out into the car park and ritually flog myself with barbed wire to expiate my sin of working whilst on holiday for the benefit of my clients. Hopefully that will placate the angry gods of Canary Wharfe and I'll still be able to earn a living and feed my kids!
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