Lisa and pensions dashboard: the week in news

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Lisa and pensions dashboard: the week in news

The government is back from holiday and it’s started work on the Lifetime Isa and the Pension Dashboard. It’s time for the week in news.

Elsewhere, are property funds on the way back? Is the Financial Conduct Authority’s register having problems? And will the Great British Bake Off survive its move to Channel 4? These are just some of the crucial questions this week has thrown up.

1) Clarity over the Lifetime Isa and Pension Dashboard

Having come back from their summer holidays, our leaders have started clarifying some of the big reforms they’ve been working on.

For a start, we’ve been told that savers who use the Lifetime Isa will be pay the 25 per cent bonus monthly.

This has set it apart from the Help to Buy Isa, which has come in for some criticism over the way its bonus is paid out.

Meanwhile the government has said a pension dashboard prototype will be ready by March 2017.

Ministers have said the pensions dashboard will need to be open to a range of companies who meet basic standards of security and data protection.

2) Advisers register their discontent with the Financial Conduct Authority

Some issues are like buses – you see no sign of them for ages then suddenly they are everywhere.

So it has been this week, with complaints about the FCA’s register.

It started after the FCA admitted it had wrongly given the impression through its register that an adviser was suspended but refused to abide by the Complaints Commissioner’s recommendation that it should pay £6,000 in compensation.

Since then the compliance manager who handled the original complaint has criticised the FCA for thinking it is above the law.

Meanwhile another adviser, Phil Castle, told FTAdviser he has been waiting for five months to get his register entry updated after the FCA admitted it “may not be sufficiently clear”.

3) Threadneedle lifts suspension on £1.3bn property fund

Columbia Threadneedle has lifted the suspension on its property fund after making £167m of disposals since July.

The property fund was one of five to gate in the aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

It is the second company to re-open its property fund after Canada Life Investments while other assets managers, like Aviva, have said immediate re-openings are unlikely.

4) SLI Gars faces criticism for not learning its lesson

Standard Life Investment’s flagship £26bn Global Absolute Return Strategies fund has been ticked off by rating agency FE, which removed it from its “Approved” buy list for the first time.

Gars has lost 3.5 per cent year to date, with its managers blaming poor returns on the irrationality and undue pessimism of other investors.

But FE said it suspected the fund has not learnt its lessons from the “taper tantrum” in 2013 when equity and bond prices fell in tandem.

5) Sipp providers interest revealed

The amount of money self-invested personal pension providers pocket on the interest they take from investors’ cash holdings varies wildly, according to analysis this week.

Abraham Okusanya, principal at research firm FinalytiQ, said some providers earn as much as 85 per cent of the interest and called for this to be disclosed in pounds and pence.

He said the industry has done a “terrible job” of disclosing this and asked the FCA to take action.