Standard Life has agreed discounted fund terms with 13 groups covering 291 funds, with an average saving of 14 basis points compared to the ongoing charges on previously available clean shares.
The cut-price range is broader than direct-to-consumer platform Hargreaves Lansdown’s Wealth 150+ and Skandia’s WealthSelect range.
The funds account for £9.1bn, or 46 per cent, of assets on the platform. On average the discounted funds have an annual management charge of 0.53 per cent and an ongoing charge of 0.8 per cent, although both figures include lower-cost passive funds from Vanguard.
The discounts are based on deals previously available through cash rebates - which are banned from next month - and are focused on some of the platform’s most popular funds, according to head of adviser platforms David Tiller.
Standard Life’s long-awaited announcement was originally trailed in September last year, and head of investment group relationships Graham Dow admitted the negotiations had taken “longer than we hoped”.
Standard Life has not enabled unit rebates and has instead focused on converting all clients to clean fee shares. Mr Tiller said Standard Life had already converted £2.2bn of assets into the so-called ‘superclean’ share classes it has secured, and aims to have £6.2bn in these shares by the summer.
The 13 groups providing discounted funds to Standard Life are: Aberdeen Asset Management, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Invesco Perpetual, Investec Asset Management, M&G, Neptune, Old Mutual Global Investors, Liontrust, Schroders, Standard Life Investments, Threadneedle and Vanguard.
Discounted share classes offered by Aberdeen, BNY, M&G and Vanguard, as well as some Standard Life Investments funds, are through unbundled insured funds and as such are only available through investment bonds or Sipps.
Mr Tiller said the discounts were “testament to the willingness of of fund groups to negotiate”.
However, Henderson Global Investors has declined to provide discounted share classes in spite of initially being named in by Standard Life as one of the groups who would be launching cut-price shares.
