Pension review providers Top 10 list

Defaqto have prepared a list of the top 10 pension review providers, based on a survey of experiences from financial advisor firms. Here’s the top 10:

1. Royal London
2. Aviva
3. Quilter
4. A J Bell
5. Fidelity
6. Prudential
7. Aegon
8. Transact
9. Canada Life
10. Aberdeen

They obviously didn’t ask us because Royal London, Prudential and Aviva are on our “worst pension review providers” list. In our experience, our list of the best pension review providers would be:

1. Parmenion
2. Canada Life
3. Quilter
4. Legal & General

Some are always going to be better than others of course.

Meanwhile, the latest report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies shows that self-employed pension savers are the least likely to increase their contributions over time. Whilst employee contributions will tend to increase because they are based on a percentage of salary. Self Employed contributions need to be changed by choice. In the last 10 years 25% of self-employed pension contributions have not changed at all. 50% only change every two years. With inflation running high, real time pension contributions are falling even faster.

Add this to the fact that less than 20% of the self-employed are contributing to a pension at all. In comparison to over 80% of employees, which is going to create a very real gap between the pensioners of the future. There will be those with guaranteed public sector pensions, those with some auto enrolment private pensions and then the self-employed, many of whom will have no private pensions.

The government should be concerned about this.

The pensions Dashboard may have helped. But the government has now announced that the dashboard will not be ready in time for its intended launch on 31^st August. Sadly, no new date has been announced yet. That will not be helpful to the 700,000 people who reach retirement age every year. Potentially disadvantaging another 2 million people if implementation is delayed until 2026.

This remains important because there are over £25 billion in funds currently sitting in small pension pots. Many of these are unclaimed because there is no mechanism to tell the pension holders about them. The Pension Dashboard is supposed to help with this.

Even with a Pension Dashboard allowing people to identify their small pension pots there is still no easy way to access them. The FCA has been looking at this issue for over 15 years now and still hasn’t come up with a solution.

With the recent announcement to expand the auto enrolment scheme the problem is only going to get worse.

There are still other dashboards available in the market which might help. Like the Investments Association Unclaimed Assets Portal.