Calls for a review of the complex and lengthy disclosure documents clients receive at the point of sale (POS) have been rejected by the Financial Conduct Authority despite the regulator admitting that customers can get confused.
Small and expensive, are funds that have failed to hit £10m ($13m, €11m) in assets just clogging up the investment universe?
The US equity market hit new highs, but bond yields are expected to fall after the US Federal Reserve voted to keep rates on hold at its latest meeting.
The number of Qrops transfers in the last financial year dropped to the lowest level since 2010/11 and is expected to fall further on the back of the UK Government’s 25% charge, as the amount of money accessed via the pensions freedoms hits a record high.
Vanguard has identified its new chief executive, while Aberdeen Asset Management has appointed a head of Luxembourg and named two heavy-hitting independent non-executive directors to the board of Aberdeen Life. AJ Bell has a new technical director.
There is a ‘clear case’ for simplifying the point of sale disclosure regime which is too complex and confusing for investors, UK platform provider AJ Bell’s chief executive said in an open letter to the FCA.
Plans by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority to crackdown on excessive asset management fund charges and improve competitiveness in the sector has been met with a flurry of contradictory responses from different parts of the financial services industry.
Nearly all financial advisers disagree with the UK regulator’s pension transfer value analysis assumptions and are having to deal with an “information vacuum” from the UK regulator, according to veteran retirement expert Mike Morrison.
The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) received 15% more complaints about pensions in 2016/2017, with Sipps one of the most complained about products, despite a 6% drop in the number of people contacting the financial redress service.
The thesaurus doesn’t offer a decent alternative to “uncertainty”, the post-election word du jour, yet Theresa May’s dire performance makes it likely we will be reading the word many times a day for the foreseeable future.
Online investment platform AJ Bell has reported rapid growth in its revenues after it added almost 12,000 customers in the space of six months.
UK consumers withdrew £10.8bn ($13.8bn, €12.7bn) from their pensions during the first two years of the pension freedoms.
