Hi, it’s Mark. Our Update today is from the mighty Oliver Perrin who’s part of our content shop. This is despite the fact I’m not on holiday or mucking around, but Oliver has a brilliant in a not-so-brilliant sense story to share and so I asked him to share it. It’s a long-ish tale, but go with it. 

But before you do, a quick shill from me for the last few remaining tickets for our London event – Divide and Conquer on 6 February at Kings Place. It’s coming together and I think will be a bit of a classic lang cat event. Get your tickets here – free or extremely cheap depending on where you work.  

Over to Oliver. 

Hello. Oliver here. I’m taking over the Update today to share with you a sorry personal tale of pension transfer awfulness. No names today, so if you work for a provider that is perhaps known for sub-optimal transfer processes, don’t worry. However I suspect that for some of you this might make uncomfortable reading. And I’m absolutely OK with that.  

In late May 2024, I decided it made sense to consolidate a previous employer’s workplace scheme into a personal pension set up with my IFA. 

First, I had to obtain the relevant form from the receiving scheme, which I was dumb enough to assume would be on my side. What’s not to like about obtaining more assets?  

Well, I waited three weeks to get hold of a bog-standard PDF – the sort that can’t be filled in online, but needs to be sent, printed, completed by hand, scanned into separate PDF pages, and then reassembled into an emailable doc. Never mind! I did it, sent it to the IFA who sent it on to the receiving scheme. 

A month passed. I heard nothing. So I gently asked the paraplanner what was going on. She called the scheme. The response: “We can’t open the PDF so nothing’s been actioned.” 

I don’t know about you, but I open PDFs all the time, and I duly reopened my file in 1.2 seconds, give or take consternation time. I resaved the doc EXACTLY as before, emailed it, the scheme received it, and announced three days later they could open it after all. Hallelujah! Money will soon flow to the right place.  

Nope. 

I sent the ceding scheme the info they wanted. But no. They wanted more, but didn’t tell me what ‘more’ was; it being a secret, presumably. Phone calls and letters bounced around for too many weeks, the culmination of which was a demand for multiple details of where my money was invested in my personal pension. I was stumped why I was being asked for this. I’ve been in the upstanding provider’s scheme for decades, under my IFA’s watchful eye, so assumed my advised status as well as the fact the PP is with a mainstream provider would knock over any concerns that my transfer was suspect. 

Enter the fray: pension scams. The ceding scheme droned on about changes in regs that meant EVERYONE could be scammed and therefore ALL pension transfers MUST be treated as potential fraud. 

Fast forward to my making 49 (YES FORTY NINE) photocopies at the local library, showing the entirety of my IFA’s choice of funds, batching this up in a large envelope and sending it all away with a growing sense of doom. 

Summer passed. Autumn came. But I consoled myself at the thought that surely now the ceding people would be happy with my efforts. Nope, again. I got a starchy letter informing me about red and yellow flags. They enclosed an unsexy dossier of FCA scam warnings, plus a detail I almost missed: ONE of the funds in my PP was yellow-flagged. And so I needed an appointment with MoneyHelper to check if the transfer could proceed. 

I drafted a long polemic explaining my situation. In brief, I was an advised person, here are the IFA’s credentials (again), the flagged fund was only one of several overseas funds and only <5% in weight, I was employed in financial services and knew all about pension scams. 

Autumn passed. Winter came. But Computer Said No. They insisted I make an appointment with MoneyHelper, which I did at the start of November. The first available appointment was the first week of December.  

As Christmas neared, the MoneyHelper chap was friendly yet impervious to my assertion this wasn’t needed. He started recording (I love being fodder for future historians) and after 52 minutes’ probing, he said all looked good, but had to go through a “final number” of warning statements, for my yay or nay. This covered everything I thought we’d already discussed. At minute 63 he said that’s it, and he’d email me the ref number I had to send to the ceding scheme. 

So…I did the necessaries fast, and assumed that AT LAST, my money would shoot from scheme to scheme. Did it heck. I got a note that the ceding scheme would now do the transfer, but it took another month to arrive with the receiver.  

2024 passed. 2025 came. 

So that’s my transfer experience. Nearly eight months of being given the run around by two providers of a failed system who seemed not to care a jot about my experience. I came close to simply giving up a few times. I know from our interactions with people in and around the advice profession that my experience, while awful, is not uncommon. So let’s not pretend to be in the least bit surprised when people say they do not trust the financial services profession. For all the good advisers and planners do, they will always unfairly be judged by the failings of firms they have no influence over. 

Surely it’s time for primary legislation to sort this mess out and mandate a sensible transfer time?  

My music choice to remind me of sanity (hah!) is Floyd’s Comfortably Numb. I particularly love watching the faces of young peeps discovering it for the first time. Enjoy.