The National Employment Savings Trust (Nest) has come bottom of a league table on the time schemes take to provide the information necessary to instigate the new pension flexibilities.
Portal Financial’s analysis covers 12,852 requests for information it made on behalf of 7,913 clients to 1,396 different defined contribution and defined benefit schemes.
Halifax topped the list for best performing provider, taking on average just one-and-a-half weeks to give the information needed to start transferring a client to a scheme that provides the new pension flexibilities, while Nest was last, taking five weeks.
Joining it in the bottom five DC schemes were Mercer (4.9 weeks), Capita (4.5 weeks), HSBC ReAssure (4.3 weeks) and St James’ Place (4.2 weeks).
Up the top of the list, all managing to provide information within two weeks, were Canada Life, Fidelity Pension Management, Sanlam Financial Services and Scottish Widows.
In terms of DB schemes, the First UK Bus Pension was the worst, taking an average of 12.4 weeks, followed by the Civil Service Pensions (11.6 weeks) and the Royal Mail Pension (11.2 weeks).
Jamie Smith-Thompson, managing director of Portal Financial, said many pension schemes are unable, or unwilling to support the new pension flexibilities, so members need to transfer to a provider that can.
“However, a transfer cannot take place until we are in receipt of the latest information and only at that point, can we provide the necessary advice on a possible transfer. It is, therefore, incredibly important that it is provided in a timely manner.”
From experience with Portal’s clients, Mr Smith-Thompson said most simply do not understand why their financial services providers do not have the information at the touch of a button.
“The delays can be very stressful and many scheme providers urgently need to improve their response times.”
Nick Sex, executive director, change programmes and service management said: “It’s difficult to comment on this specific research. Because Nest is a young scheme, we’ve had very few requests to transfer money out of Nest into other schemes for the purpose of consolidation.
“Where these occur we respond as quickly as we can, but this depends on the complexity of the case and the information provided to us by members. For transfer requests, we aim to reply in 10 days based on all of the information being provided to us.”
peter.walker@ft.com
