In this Q&A, we talk to Stephen McPhillips, Technical Sales Director, Dentons Pensions, who provides insights into the company, and considers the changes in the SIPP market over the past year and what they mean for advice firm clients.
PP: For paraplanners who might not know Dentons, what is the proposition that you offer advice firms?
Stephen McPhillips (SM): Dentons Pensions provides self invested personal pensions (SIPPs) and small self administered schemes (SSAS). We offer two distinct SIPP products – a full SIPP with a wide range of permitted investments (including commercial property) and what we call a Single Portfolio SIPP – for clients whose investment needs are met by one single investment platform or DFM. The Single Portfolio SIPP is a lower cost product than the full SIPP because there tends to be less day-to-day administration work required on these.
We genuinely put the client at the heart of everything we do, and we exist to provide industry-leading levels of personalised service to our clients and our supporting regulated introducers of business. SIPP and SSAS administration is all that we do; we are not distracted from this by trying to build our own investment proposition, by continually trying to reinvent our own proposition – or by anything else for that matter!
What do you believe makes Dentons stand out in the market?
SM: The fact that we provide a named and dedicated Pensions Administrator (overseen by a Pension Consultant) for each client, and the fact that we answer the phone when paraplanners, advisers and clients call us, seems to strike the chord that a lot of our competitors don’t appear to achieve – especially when we compare our award-winning service credentials to theirs.
How do you make it easy for paraplanners to research your offering and do business with you?
SM: We have participated in the Technical Insights Seminars for a number of years now and enjoy doing so! These help us to meet and interact with paraplanners who may not have come across us before. At each Seminar, we give attendees a quick introduction to Dentons and we offer to follow-up with individual paraplanners via our national team of business development professionals (who can meet paraplanners in person anywhere in the country).
In addition, we have ready-made and easily available due diligence packs (on SIPP and SSAS separately) on our website. These include detailed information on how Dentons is structured and owned, how we operate and deliver our industry-leading levels of service and much more.
We have a dedicated Sales Support Team who assist paraplanners with SIPP new business illustrations, checking SIPP and SSAS application paperwork, dealing with anti-money laundering formalities and so on. Sales Support work closely with the field-based business development professionals to make it as easy as possible to do business with Dentons.
Once an adviser firm begins to use Dentons, we try to ensure that all future clients who are introduced to Dentons from that adviser firm are dealt with by the same administration team. In practice, this means that paraplanners will deal with a very small number of people within Dentons and that has helped us to build strong relationships accordingly.
The way we deliver service is consistent throughout our relationship with adviser firms – from the first client introduction onwards. Our business development professionals meet regularly with adviser firms to ascertain any ongoing needs and we are regularly asked to provide technical training in the form of webinars and seminars on a bespoke basis for adviser firms. These can be on anything from the abolition of the lifetime allowance and its impacts through to the inner workings of a SSAS.
What developments have you made recently?
SM: The highest profile change in the pensions world this year has been the abolition of the lifetime allowance (LTA). We’re very fortunate to have our own in-house IT team which manages and develops our own bespoke SIPP and SSAS administration systems. Our team have worked hard to make all the necessary changes that are necessary in the post-LTA world. Aside from that, on a corporate level, we have a new Managing Director, David Holloway. David has over 21 years of experience across the financial services sector, predominately in SIPP and SSAS pensions. David joined Dentons in 2013, was made a Pension Consultant in 2019, and Director in 2021, joining the Dentons Board. In addition, some paraplanners may know Hannah Berns from her time in the Sales and Marketing Team. Hannah moved into the Administration Team a few years ago and she has now been appointed to the Board of Directors of Dentons Pension Management Limited.
In relation to Consumer Duty requirements, we have fully embraced these and potential new clients are offered the vehicle which accords with their investment requirements – much in line with how we’ve operated for many years.
In addition, we are continuing to enhance our secure portal for SIPP, making more and more client documents available electronically so that paraplanners and clients have the choice of calling us for information or accessing it in digital form. In addition, we continue to make use of electronic signatures wherever possible in the application process and on data-gathering forms.
The SIPP market has had a bumpy ride in the past couple of years. Do you think we are through that period and how has it affected the market and SIPP propositions?
SM: The SIPP market has indeed had a bumpy ride in the past few years. Sadly, there have been significant numbers of provider failures, which have reflected badly on the market – and, more importantly, have negatively impacted clients of those providers – many of whom are still stuck in limbo in trying to move to different providers.
However, that’s not to say that the whole SIPP provider community has been negatively impacted – because many clients need (or continue to need) the flexibility that a SIPP product offers. I’m pleased to say that Dentons is enjoying a record year of new business cases – many of which have resulted from transfers away from other SIPP providers and across to Dentons.
Consolidation has been another major feature of the SIPP market in recent years. Again, sadly, some consolidation activity has in itself led to provider failures and a business model of consolidation for consolidation’s sake (i.e. to grow very big very quickly) doesn’t appear to favour clients or their advisers. Lack of due diligence (both on acquisition targets and on the underlying investments within books of business) appears to have caused issues that have been difficult to unravel.
In terms of whether or not we’ve seen the last of provider failures, I’m sorry to say that it wouldn’t surprise me if there were further failures in the future, but I hope I’m wrong on that.
What we might see in the market is providers becoming more and more cautious about what types of investment they will allow within their SIPP books moving forward. I think we’ll also see further consolidation within the sector – and hopefully that is carefully controlled acquisition activity where the acquirer takes a good hard look at the book/business to be acquired and if acceptable, hopefully the acquired business and its clients can be quickly and smoothly integrated without affecting both sets of clients involved (the acquired business’s clients and the existing clients of the acquirer).
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