Legal & General Retail Retirement has agreed a new partnership to provide annuities to PensionBee customers.
From 3rd August, customers enquiring about an annuity with PensionBee will be introduced to Legal & General for further information, or to get a quotation. Legal & General will also help customers find the best rate available through its whole of market annuity comparison service, www.annuityready.com .
Pension Bee are getting ready for the COVID-delayed investment pathways , now due to be launched in February 2021 and including a pathway to an annuity providing guaranteed income
For Legal & General , this is this is the fifth deal announced and follows similar partnerships with AEGON, Prudential and Sun Life Financial of Canada.
So what?
Well so quite a lot actually. “Pension Bee and annuities” wasn’t a combination that many would have expected to think about only a couple of years ago and this announcement shows just how far Pension Bee has come since its early disruptive days.
The partnership developing between Pension Bee and L&G is also interesting. L&G’s Retirement Division is currently a jewel in its crown and Emma Byron is building a formidable team. Pension Bee is also led by a strong and progressive team under Romi Savova and both of the power brokers in this deal have youth on their side.
Annuities are being purchased in increasing numbers.
Mark Ormston reports that Retirement Line is doing record volumes of business through the pandemic.
Retirement Line, who are a major distributor of L&G annuities report, have been actively promoting the deal
The promotion of annuities is generally through non-advised arrangements and is creating a new and generally under=reported infrastructure. But in a re-emerging market it is good to see brokers and advisers working together. We have been struck by how customer-focused the personal annuity is and the breadth of choice available to people interested in annuity options.
Annuities – and online choice
Five years on from the introduction of pension freedoms , annuities are making a resurgence , not just as a means to buy out defined benefit liabilities but as part of the choice architecture people consider when turning pension pots into retirement plans.
People have the choice of buying annuities through a financial adviser or through an annuity broker who can give information about choices but can’t provide a definitive choice of action.
At AgeWage we will now be featuring three routes to an annuity as next steps for people who are interested in the different choices available to them.
- Access to Billy Burrows’ Better Retirement Group who offer advice on retirement options and an annuity service
- Direct access to Retirement Line
- Indirect access to L&G’s Annuity Ready service through Pension Bee.
It seems that financial technology is well placed to promote not just annuities, but ways to access them. We are looking forward to finding out from our test group, which approach suits them best. If you’d like to be a part of this test , you can register at agewage.com and follow our simple journey to these choices.
In marked contrast to wealth management
While the likes of Pension Bee and AgeWage actively embrace annuities as a pension freedom, they appear to be pretty well ignored by the wealth management industry. Referrals to annuity brokers from wealth managers are rare and annuity providers can see from Equifax Touchstone that their business is sourced primarily from Retirement Line, Hub Financial and other on-line and telephony based businesses.
The increasing penetration of Legal & General into the at retirement decision making of organisations such as Aegon and Prudential suggests that the non-advised market is regrouping in new ways.
Who would have thought that annuities would have embraced financial technology in this way?
Who would have thought that Pension Bee would be promoting annuities through L&G?
Just my usual Cassandra imitation. For people getting, or entitled to, means-tested benefits, an annuity will reduce their benefits, penny for penny, until they stop being entitled. It’s particularly complex for rent-payers and for Council Tax Reduction. If that’s ignored by the pensions industry – and I’ve seen some bad exanples recently – then that can cause great harm to individuals, and i would worry about misselling if I was an adviser.
@Gareth
I have seen a couple of examples as well. People should look carefully who they recommend a pension annuity, as they can lose their Housing benefit or what it is its name now.
Do you think there should be a generic risk warning “not suitable for those on benefits”? A further problem is the large number of people who aren’t claiming pension credit but should be – should these people be looking at alternative investment pathways?
Absolutely not. You don’t lock out a group of people from having an informed choice because they’re poor! There will be some circumstances where annuities could work for them. Informed choices is the mantra. Understanding what their personal options and consequences are.
Henry, quite funny actually.
I was looking in the next few days at Legal and General as a possible investment for me and my clients i.e. to buy its stock. Somehow I felt uneasy.
Today we had the earnings announcement, and it is actually not good. They tried to dress it up a bit, but net profit for the first 6-months is down to £294 million from £874 million, one it took a £483 million ‘adjustment’ to account to lower interest rates on liabilities (probably some with-profits liabilities). Even without that ‘write off’ profits would have been 11% or so lower.
Worst the ‘general insurance’ part of the business (car and home insurance, yacht insurance etc) brought no operational earnings – £0. In 6-months when cars were not on the roads? Come on!
Not sure what is going on with UK insurers, but paying higher dividends than net earnings would not lead to good outcomes in the end.