Allied Pensions

L

legend99

Guest
Just about to switch our pensions in work to these guys...anyone have any knowledge of them?
The three investment people available under them for us are BOI, F&C and Irish Life
 
Just to clarify ... I presume that Allied are pension consultants acting as intermediaries between the employer/employees/trustees and the scheme underwriters?
 
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Thats my understanding...they offer stuff like being able to log on to a website to see current values, amounts paid in by employer, employee etc.
 
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How are they remunerated for providing these services? Do the fund underwriters themselves not provide these sort of services? I was never clear what the functions of pension consultants were in the context of occupationals schemes to be honest and my limited experience of them has been, on balance, negative.
 
Re: Pension Consultants

Allied Pension Trustees will be acting as consultants and administrators I imagine, ie, they will be keeping the records of each individual member, contributions paid, fund choices, etc. In a consultancy capacity they would be responsible for advising the scheme Trustees on matters such as investment, legislation, scheme design, responsible for completion of annual reports. They will not actually invest monies.

The alternative to an independant consultant/administrator is to be strait-jacketed into a single insurance company contract with considerably less flexibility, usually very poor standards of service, and in most cases, the cost of running the scheme borne by the members through charges against their contributions. If you choose to investigate APT's remuneration, I expect you'll find they are paid a fee for their services by your employer and there are no charges against member contributions. The Investment Managers will have an annual Fund Management Fee, typically 0.75% p.a., but possibly lower depending on the overall assets of your scheme.

Have APT been appointed to replace a previous Consultants? If so, this may be because of unsatisfactory service as alluded to by O, or based on fees, or possibly the online access. Have the Trusttes commmunicated their reasons to you, or have APT presented to you?
 
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The employer here pays their fee. Previously we were exclusively with F&C...aka Friends First and people were sick of the guy who used come down every year saying how much we had lost in the previous 12 months. In fairness though, everyone was losing.
Which made me ask a question of a guy from PwC...who are employed as well. I think PwC used advise the trustees....who had Friends First for us. Now we still have PwC, Allied Pensions in the middle and the 3 investment houses behind them. Seems a lot of excess baggage to me but anyway.
I asked the guy from PwC about the possibility of going with someone whacky who didn't just follow market trends by investing in the usual patterns and where everyone manages to end up within a few % points of everyone else, be it up or down.

His answer was bizarre. He said if he allowed that he could be liable to be accused of dodgy involvement and could be done....which made me think that it sounds suspisciouly like a caretl cas everyone has to follow everyone else or they could also be liable!


Incidentally AP did present to us....I was off on a big long holiday though!
 
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How long would you expect someone like this to take to move money from one fund manager to another?
Even bearing in mind that the first fund has to sell, get the cheque to the trustrees, that money then has to go to the other fund manager and be used to buy units?
 
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That's a hard question as different providers have different service levels. But two working weeks is fairly common for many transactions in the pensions arena. So a month for the two transactions would not be unusual.
 
Re: Switching between fund managers

Hi L99

If you're talking about an entire pension fund moving from one manager to another, then it could take some time, but the trustees should try to arrange it so that the amount of time they are out of the market is minimised.

If what you're asking is how long should it take an individual member to switch from one fund manager offered under a particular pension scheme to another fund manager under the same scheme, then I imagine the time taken will be a lot less than a month, perhaps only a day or two.

Regards
Homer
 
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