Schroders-owned Benchmark Capital is looking to offer a self invested personal pension (Sipp) through its pension company Bright Square Pensions.
The Fusion Wealth Sipp will be available in Q3 2019 and will cost £85 plus VAT as an annual administration fee.
The product will allow tax free cash, capped drawdown, flexi-access drawdown and newer decumulation variants including continuous crystallisation, also known as drip feed drawdown.
It is targeted at clients of financial adviser firms who are currently using the Fusion Wealth platform. It was already piloted with a select number of firms.
Fusion Wealth is a DFM and platform owned by Benchmark Capital alongside other firms such as adviser network Aspect8. Bright Square Pensions is also owned by Benchmark and trades as Bright Square Sipp, Fusion Wealth Pension, Fusion Wealth Personal Pension, and Fusion Wealth Sipp, according to the FCA register.
Benchmark Capital stated it decided to launch the Sipp after it became concerned about the service offered by other Sipp providers linked to the Fusion Wealth platform.
Jo French, chief operating officer at Benchmark Capital, told FTAdviser: "Our one concern was feedback from customers and advisers – unilaterally they told us that they had different experiences for the same transactions and events across different providers.
"Some providers copied the advisers in to customer communications and some providers did not; some providers were electronic with their communications and some providers were not. It was the inconsistency of customer experience that stood out for us as an opportunity to improve."
Another reason was requests from advisers for Benchmark Capital to build a Fusion Wealth Sipp to run alongside the Fusion Wealth Isa and Fusion Wealth GIA (general investment account) to give a standard set of platform product choices.
Ms French also said: "Our advisers were keen to write business to a new, clean Sipp that had no legacy assets or concern over past business that may have been accepted."
This comes after some providers have crumbled under complaints being brought by their clients about high risk investments they accepted in the past that later failed.
Benchmark Capital partnered with pension administrator Dunstan Thomas to build the technology for the Fusion Wealth Sipp.
According to Dunstan Thomas, the Sipp provides clients with a full view of their data through the use of application programming interface (API) and also offers various ways to draw an income.
Dunstan Thomas has also automated the distribution of new contributions made to the Sipp to multiple funds as customised by advisers for their clients.
Chris Read, group chief executive officer at Dunstan Thomas, said: "Given the fact that 60 per cent of all Fusion-managed assets were already held within a pension wrapper at the project outset, it made great business sense for a good portion of those assets to be held within the new Fusion Wealth Sipp rather than by a number of other providers’ Sipps.
"Dunstan Thomas Imago Administration and Imago Illustrations offered Benchmark a smooth path to launch its own Sipp – moving from configuration to go live in under nine months."
Last week (June 17), the international business of platform Novia, Novia Global, launched a Sipp targeted at UK expats.
Novia’s international Sipp is available from today (June 24) and will be charged at £45 (plus VAT) per quarter, with no set up fees.
The international Sipp will be fully integrated into the Novia Global platform and clients can access the Origo platform to facilitate the transfer of their pension to the new Sipp.
amy.austin@ft.com
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