Transaction costs

We’re committed to providing full transparency around our fees and the additional costs you may be charged by our money managers. As transaction costs can reduce the performance of your plan it’s important that you know about them.

Our money managers (BlackRock, State Street Global Advisors and HSBC) sometimes incur transaction costs when they manage your money. That’s because each of our plans has transaction costs associated with trading investments.

Specifically, these costs are related to the buying and selling of underlying securities (such as shares) in your plan, and can include costs such as stamp duty reserve tax or levies charged by the regulatory or tax authorities. Transaction costs are separate to your annual PensionBee management fee, so we don’t make any money from them, and most money managers now separately disclose these costs.

The transaction costs in our plans are generally very small as we only work with the largest money managers in the world. The weighted average cost is 0.04% and they range from 0.00% to 0.14%. You can find out more about how transaction costs are calculated, and see how we’ve tried to simplify transaction costs by comparing them to a topic we are all familiar with: grocery shopping.