SIPPS and QROPS Checklist

Brooklands SIPP Trustees – IVCM review


Brooklands SIPP trustees went into administration in July 2016.

Whilst it would be easy to say that TailorMade never recommended Brooklands trustees, that does not help those clients of firms who have. Our understanding is that the “assets and client bank” of Brooklands have been bought by Heritage Pensions, who are now the trustees of Brooklands SIPP.

The old Brooklands team set up a new operation called IVCM which they rebranded late in 2015 in tandem with Heritage, and this new SIPP is unaffected by the winding up of Brooklands. Brooklands SIPP trustees were previously offering to transfer management of the SIPPs to IVCM and we are unsure if that is still the case with Heritage. We have obtained the IVCM terms and we comment on this below.

As the assets of the funds within Brooklands SIPP are held under separate custodianship, the funds themselves should not be affected. However, there may be some Financial Ombudsmen Claims ( FOS ) claims for unregulated funds that failed ( as is the case with a fund  in Australia). However, not all individuals and funds will be covered, and some will lose that proportion of their money. This makes a compulsive arguement for why we recommend only using a UK firm with a UK terms of business when receiving advice on pensions, and not those of third party companies with similar names or same trading names but not UK terms of business when receiving advice.

Concerns

A concern to some clients may be the reason why Brooklands SIPP trustees went into administration. The Financial Ombudsman Service provisionally ruled against Brooklands SIPP trustees regarding some of their clients’ investment fund  failures. These funds were sold by financial firms overseas that did not cover the liability themselves.

We would always advise people to take advice on the transfer of a SIPP to SIPP or QROPS preferably with a UK regulated IFA. A UK regulated IFA has access to all the SIPPs on the market. Some of the better priced SIPPs and SIPP platforms are not available to non-UK adviser firms. As we have already stated, TailorMade have never recommended Brooklands trustees, but we have been asked by clients of adviser firms who employed Brooklands staff , who used the same trading name but not the same company, what they can do. They advertise as UK but use offshore companies to do business. The answer is unfortunately, not a lot, other than warn your friends to check who you are actually dealing with. A trading name is meaningless unless their is deliberate misleading statements made, and we would simply suggest that people make sure they sign a UK terms of business that does not exclude offshore advice. We offer it and so do many other UK based firms.

We are unsure of the source of IVCM investment recommendations but in a recent poll of 20 advisers in the UK, not one of them had used Brooklands or planned on using IVCM. Separately, the current offer from IVCM does not look competitively priced compared to what else is available on the market and other options can be considered.

Therefore, our conclusion has to be that if their new IVCM model continues to take investments recommended by overseas advisers, without UK FSCS and FOS cover, that clients should be aware of this and the fact that there are many competitively priced SIPP providers in the UK. Finally, we recommend you obtain a terms of business with a UK regulated adviser firm, not some clone offshore with a similar name.

 

 

The views expressed in this article are not to be construed as personal advice. You should contact a qualified and ideally regulated adviser in order to obtain up to date personal advice with regard to your own personal circumstances. If you do not then you are acting under your own authority and deemed “execution only”. The author does not except any liability for people acting without personalised advice, who base a decision on views expressed in this generic article. Where this article is dated then it is based on legislation as of the date. Legislation changes but articles are rarely updated, although sometimes a new article is written; so, please check for later articles or changes in legislation on official government websites, as this article should not be relied on in isolation.

This article was published in 23rd August 2016

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