The following article highlights that Pension Fees for individual products are still too high especially products offered from Insurance companies. This is a problem in the UK but the problem is exacerbated in less regulated markets like Hong Kong, Asia Pacific region and the Middle East.
Chris Anderson
Director
Indigo Global
Article follows.....
The UK's pensions industry took a beating from the BBC’s investigative TV show Panorama last night, which found Britons paying into private pensions can end up seeing the equivalent of as much as 80% of what they pay in being taken out again by various product providers.
A number of pension experts and financial advisers were interviewed by the BBC1 show, Who Took My Pension, including Sam Instone, managing director of AES International, the London-based international financial services firm, and Hargreaves Lansdown pension expert Tom McPhail.
There is also reference to the deVere Group, and its chief executive, Nigel Green, as well as a shot of the cover of a recent edition of International Adviser, on which Green's photograph appeared.
The job of explaining the pension industry’s rationale for taking the fees it does was left to Maggie Craig, acting director general of the Association of British Insurers.
At one point, the shrinkage of many poorly-performing British pensions is demonstrated by Instone and Panorama journalist Penny Haslam, who start out being driven in a stretch limo through the streets of London’s financial district.
After stopping at the offices of an insurance company, fund house and other entities down the pension product food chain, the limo is replaced by a series of smaller and smaller cars, until Instone and Haslam end up beside a rack full of London’s recently-introduced rental bicycles.
Towards the end of the show, David Pitt-Watson, a pensions expert and founder of the Hermes Focus Fund, one of the first-ever shareholder activist funds, notes that a typical Dutch citizen paying the same amount into a Dutch pension as his British counterpart would end up with 50% more in his pension pot.
International Adviser
05 October 2010 by Helen Burggraf