The price we are paying for others to manage our retirement funds is the subject of Jo Cumbo’s last piece of writing as FT global pension correspondent and it is a theme that she has developed over the past decade.

The OFT, the CMA, the FCA and the Pensions Regulator have all observed over that time that employers, trustees and private individuals are not good buyers of fund management, tending to overpay for what they are purchasing and losing to smarter salespeople than they can deal with.

Without elevating the argument up the ladder of abstraction, we aren’t very good buyers because we don’t know the true price of what we are paying and we don’t understand what we are paying for. Which is why this discussion is so often couched in consumerist terms as one of “value for money”.

My friend and co-founder of AgeWage, Chris Sier tells the FT

“Some clients are being treated bloody unfairly, asset managers appear to price in an extreme range, and offer different clients vastly different prices for the exactly the same thing”.

That is the authentic voice of the man and it puts clearly the outcome of our being worse at buying than asset and fund managers are at selling.

So what is the answer?

There has long been an argument for price controls in pensions. The DC charge cap is one such control, instigated because the OFT found in 2013

We see price controls in utilities – this week Ofwat are arguing with water companies about what a captive market (users of water) should be paying for clean H2O.

But here the buyer is both unable to negotiate the price or assess the value of what they are paying for and the case for Government intervention is very strong.

Demands of successive regulators have been for full cost disclosure on not just the amount retained by asset managers for their pockets, but the amount they spend on managing assets and funds from our pockets (the fund expenses). We now know the full price (to us) of asset management and we should be able to see (through proper disclosure of net performance) the impact of not just the costs but the value generated by asset and fund managers.

Put aside the value, it is clear from what Chris Sier is saying that some buyers are paying up to 14 times more for what they are getting than the cheapest rate for the same asset management offering. This is clearly a bad thing but one that is explicable in a world where there is a continuing asymmetry between the buy and sell side.

Chris has – through Clearglass – done what he can to even things up, putting information in the hands of buyers that allow them to negotiate from a position of strength. But not all information is disclosed, favored nation status is accorded to buyers so they think they are getting the best price at the expense of going under a non-disclosure agreement that precludes them from sharing the price they are getting. In theory everyone can think they have the best price without anyone knowing for sure!

Living in the City as I do at the moment, I see the fruits of this kind of behavior in the opulent lifestyles of those who I go to pubs and restaurants with. This may infuriate the regulators and trustees and most of all Chris , Jo Cumbo and Emma Dunkley but it is not something that will go away so long as we have an intervention free market.

And weirdly for most of us, the Government are more minded to lift its interventions than strengthen them. Charge caps on DC pensions are being perforated to allow performance fees to be excluded, MIFID and PRIIPS disclosures on investment trusts are being diluted to ensure that people don’t get put off buying by “over-disclosure”. It is generally considered restrictive on the purchase of illiquid assets, to demand daily disclosure of costs and valuations and it is recognised that management fees on private assets are necessarily higher than on the quoted equivalent. The simple truth is that a quoted stock comes with most of the management costs included in the stock price while private assets are virgin territory for asset managers who argue that they charge more to do more.

Weirdly (for me), I now work within a private equity operation and can see both sides of this and I no longer feel – as many friends like Chris do –  that transparency is always the answer. Deals are deals, most require an element of cross-subsidy and in the world of private markets , the trade-offs can be fierce and complicated.

In short, I have no answer to the problem of over-paying other than to hope that as we get fewer buyers (because of consolidation) we get better buyers. I am not sure I thoroughly believe this will happen but I’ll argue that a small number of big buyers makes for a better market than the fractured pension system that we had ten years ago and still – to an extent – have today.

In the meantime, we need Chris Sier and Jo Cumbo to remind us that the market is still far from being right