Friends First

[admoriarty]

Just wondering can anyone speak for or against Friends First, I'm looking to start an executive pension with them soon and notice they use Anglo Irish for their banking affairs, should this even slightly concern me. Aside from that what would the people in the pension business on this forum say for Friends First service in general?

 

[StevieC]

That they do their banking with Anglo wouldnt bother me to be honest. Its State owned now and Friends First are part of the Eureko group, one of Europe's largest insurance groups. I would have no worries about doing business with Friends First.

I'd would be more concerned about their investment performance and the charging structure they are offering you though. You dont specify what investment strategy you are going for but judging by the latest managed fund figures compiled by Mercer, Friends First havent done particularly well over 5 year and 10 year periods compared to their peers.

Past performance isnt an indicator of future performance etc etc but it does give some indication of whether they made the right calls in the past or not.

If you want pm me your email address and I'll forward you the latest managed fund figures so you can see for yourself how companies have done performance wise compared to each other.

 

[admoriarty]

Stephen

I'll send my address by PM, any info would be appreciated! The reason I'm likely to go with Friends First is that this is a brokered deal through the accountancy firm who handle my contracting...the terms seem more favourable than Joe Soap would get, as for fund performance, from what I've read so far Friends First seem to have access to a lot of the same funds as others, by poor performance I assume you mean the funds they also offer that are managed by themselves? Its hard to find funds with a good track record of late so thats not so worrying, I'm starting near the bottom so hopefully that will work in my favour!

Thanks for your input

 

[edwardg]

When I was a financially nieve young man I took out an endowment mortgage with Friends First sold to me by the lender EBS. This policy matured in 2008 and its maturity value was substantially below the value predicted by Friends First at the time of its sale to me in 1988. The policy proceeds failed to pay off the outstanding amount on the mortgage. Friends First failed to apologise for this shortfall even though it has caused me great financial difficulty.

When I raised this with Friends First their attitude was tough luck, you should have read the small print and the EBS should have warned you. I shall be shortly raising my case with the Financial Ombudsman.

That is my experience with Friends First.