As some of you might remember, each summer we used to publish our Robin Hood Index, sharing all of the transfer data we came across over the past year.
We shared the best and worst transfer times, as well as exit fees, high annual management charges and overall fee transparency. We did this to highlight pain points for our customers and measure where friction decreased, increased or disappeared over time.
Robin Hood did a great job to shine a light on shocking anti-consumer practices that still persist across the industry. Needless to say we ruffled a few feathers!
While we were pulling all this data together each year, and in the spirit of transparency and honesty, we wanted to add our own transfer data. This is the average time it takes for us to send clients funds to their new provider electronically via Origo Options. We don’t have any exit fees and our simple annual fee for each plan is transparently displayed!
We believed everybody should be doing this, so decided to lead the charge!
From 2017 onwards, we began to publish all our own transfer data, both the number of transfers out and average transfer time for each month. Our average transfer out times for 2017 and 2018 were under 12 days.
We’ve been working hard behind the scenes since then to improve our processes and drive down transfer times month on month. We’re pleased to see the results of that - and we’ve now reduced our average transfer out time to 8.4 days!
Stronger together
We spent a lot of time encouraging other providers to do the same and were very pleased that last year an official industry transfer index was finally published.
From 2019 onwards, Origo Options, the electronic pension transfer service, began to publish the average transfer out times for 28 different providers. You can see all the Origo data from April 2018 to September 2019 for different industry providers.
How do our transfer times compare?
As you can see from the official industry transfer index, PensionBee’s average 8.4 days simpler transfer time (where we can be held fully accountable for the whole transfer out process) compares very well with the other providers who publish.
There are many providers who still refuse to publish their times and refuse to use electronic transfers. It’s like the 21st century doesn’t exist! Our data shows that savers can still wait up to 62 days to move their pension!
Further reducing transfer times
We are continuously improving our processes and service and will continue to drive this transfer out time down over time. For now we are very pleased that transfers out are dealt with quickly and efficiently.
We are also happy to give our customers a clear idea of how long it will take to move their money to another FCA-regulated or TPR-approved pension provider!
