Disagree with the new pension levy

DerKaiser said:

Life and pensions - pensions by far the bigger driver

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Thanks for clarifications, though I'm not sure that it fully validates your comments about the competitiveness of the industry. I'm wondering if Aviva had any exceptional costs that year, such as redundancy or major IT investments which can skew the figures?

I'd really love to see some broader analysis - does anyone survey or report on fees and charges, in the same way that the report on fund performance?

Complainer said:

Thanks for clarifications, though I'm not sure that it fully validates your comments about the competitiveness of the industry. I'm wondering if Aviva had any exceptional costs that year, such as redundancy or major IT investments which can skew the figures?

I'd really love to see some broader analysis - does anyone survey or report on fees and charges, in the same way that the report on fund performance?

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New Business profitability will always exclude one-off costs, though poor margins could simply be an indication of too high an underlying cost base. I can't imagine their underlying cost base has moved upwards recently, but sales have declined and they clearly haven't been in a position to maintain profitability leaving cost cuts as the only real option - thus indicating a decent level of competition in the market.

It would be useful for someone to do a survey for pensions.

It's quite easy to compare annuity and term assurance rates (and comparisons regularly appear in the Best Buys and Make Me Richer sections of the sunday papers).

By law a schedule of the impact of charges and commissions is provided with all quotations to potential customers, so this could be used as a basis for a survey.

Anecdotally it has to be acknowledged margins in the UK are more cut throat and competitive than here, whilst continental european policyholders generally suffer from massively higher charges.