Adviser accuses Scottish Widows of payment delay

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Adviser accuses Scottish Widows of payment delay

An adviser has accused Scottish Widows of taking an unacceptably long time to give one of his clients tax-free cash.

Philip Perry, a director at Stalybridge-based Ark Financial Planning, said that one of his clients who had money across five separate pension schemes held with the provider had wanted to merge these into one and go into drawdown in order to access tax-free cash.

He said that after an application was sent in February Scottish Widows transferred the money on 27 March, but claimed the client had not confirmed receipt of the tax-free cash until 17 April.

Mr Perry said: “They have a pledge that they will pay out in 17 days on receipt of cash, which is a really bad turnaround, but they have not even met it.

“We have just started using Scottish Widows again but they have ruined it all in one fell swoop.”

A Scottish Widows spokesman said: “Like much of the industry we have seen a rise in the volume of requests for pension consolidations, which has led to some cases where we haven’t been able to process payments as quickly as we would like.”

He said this particular situation had been exacerbated by poor communication with Ark Financial and the spokesman said Scottish Widows was very sorry for the inconvenience caused to them and their client.

The spokesman added: “Scottish Widows has invested heavily in preparing itself for pension freedoms and despite receiving an unprecedented volume of calls and requests in recent weeks the overall feedback we have had from customers and intermediaries has been positive.

“While we are aiming to credit customer accounts within seven working days, more complicated requests including pension transfers and consolidation will take longer to process.”