Using its ‘open market’ expertise, national IFA, pensions and employee benefits consultancy LEBC Group (LEBC) is offering to help pension providers review their annuity sales to existing customers.
This follows the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) announcement before Christmas asking some pension providers to do further work to determine if the FCA’s findings in relation to enhanced annuities are indicative of a more widespread problem and/or have led to poor consumer outcomes when buying annuities.
Nick Flynn, Divisional Director at LEBC, says: “If pension providers were interested, we could easily develop our existing processes to make them available to help them with a redress solution to meet the FCA’s requirements. We have considerable experience of the annuity market and have established robust processes to determine the most suitable annuities for clients using the open market approach which has often identified an enhanced annuity as being the best option.
“If providers do not step up to the plate with this issue there is a danger that annuity mis-selling could become an even bigger mis-selling scandal than PPI and would involve considerably significant financial consequences as well as putting the industry’s delicate reputation at severe risk once again.”
Nick had previously, says: “The results from the FCA’s latest study on the annuity market were welcome news for consumers but in all reality it remained a shame it’s come five to six years too late as problems and issues have continuously been highlighted. Pension providers will now be very worried as the consequences for them could be considerable.”
