This is a very good question and well timed as I have just agreed terms for a new PRSA contract.
The base cost is 0.5%pa for the PRSA based on a minimum fund size of €100,000. This is payable to a revenue appointed independent trustee.
There is a separate cost of 0.05%pa payable to an FSA regulated Stockbroker in London. The stockbrocker acts as independent custodian and charges all trades at a flat rate of €30 each excluding incidental costs like stamp duty on UK and Irish stocks.
The benefit of splitting out the trustee, custodian, fund management and advisory services into separate companies can be explained in three words: Custom House Capital.
So for example if I put in a global equity fund I can have over 10,000 stocks including emerging markets for a TER of 0.62%. Giving a total cost for the contract of 1.17%pa on an audited TER basis before advisory costs. On a like for like basis, the annual management charge of this fund is 0.42%pa and therefore total disclosed charge is actually only 0.97%pa. Note that this is one of the more expensive funds I use and typically bond funds are around 0.15% to 0.25%pa which would substantially reduce the cost of a balanced portfolio to more like 0.9%pa.
Of course this is something that doesn't happen in an off the shelf PRSA where you typically pay 1%pa for equity funds but also 1%pa for cash and bond funds.
This contract is only available for core pension investments and is comprised of institutional class index funds from Vanguard, Blackrock and Dimensional who between them manage over 5 trillion US$. This part is not self directed.
However we can also add on a self directed element for anyone wanting to run a Las Vegas account as part of their pension. This has a higher annual management charge of 1.25%pa on investments under €100,000 but again transactions are charged at a flat rate.
This part of the PRSA can include property,hedge funds,private equity, ETFs and individual securities.
So, a typical client might have a total pension pot of say €200,000 of which say €30k is in some illiquid product that they can't get out of even if they wanted to.
We can take in the whole lot, put €170k into a globally diversified portfolio of low cost funds appropriate to their willingness, ability and need to take investment risk and we can carve out the €30k into a separate plan.
Overall based on the earlier example of a 0.9%amc for 170k and 1.25% for the other part this would result in an overall plan charge of 0.9525%pa before advisory and trading costs.
So for anyone stuck owning illiquid assets they wish they had never purchased (custom house clients for example) this could be a good solution.
Equally anyone who wants to take a punt with a couple of grand of their pension fund can open a separate account specifically for that purpose and not have to expose their whole pension to the additional costs associated with full self-directed functionality. The minimum investment here would be €2000 when linked to a pension portfolio.
Finally I should mention that this contract is only available through my network of approved professional advisers and advisory fees are payable in all instances.