AJ Bell, the Sipp and investment provider, has urged the Financial Conduct Authority to make the disclosure regime for pension and investment products clearer.
In an open letter to Christopher Woolard, director of strategy and competition at the FCA, AJ Bell said: “The current disclosure regime for pension and investment products has become so complex that it is confusing for consumers and is not helping them to make informed decisions.”

The pensions provider added the current regime, ‘is no longer fit for purpose’ and it could lead to customers ending up with products that are not suitable or difficult to understand.

AJ Bell says an investor could receive a number of documents at the point of a sale, including a suitability report, key features illustration, key investor information document and sometimes a transfer value analysis, which could, ultimately, be “bewildering” to the customer.

The firm was founded in 1995 and has over 150,000 customers, looking after assets worth up to £36.3 billion.



Andy Bell, chief executive at AJ Bell, said in the letter: “The case for carrying out a wide-ranging review of all the communications sent to customers at the point of sale is clear. Only by doing this can the regulator, in partnership with the industry and advisers, begin to scope out those bits of information that help consumers make a decision and those bits that do not.

“The overarching aim of this project should be simplification. Ideally we would like to see a reset of the regulatory approach to disclosure so that, rather than adding layers to a broken model, the FCA builds a new framework that savers can really engage with.

“In doing this, the FCA should be bold. Can we, for example, get the majority of information a retail investor needs onto a single page document? Clearly this would be a challenge and people should have access to additional information should they want it, but for the majority of people we believe this radically simplified format would suffice.

“We appreciate the regulator’s role must strike a balance between informing consumers and protecting them. But the current disclosure rules were created in a different era and without serious consideration of how they interact with each other.”

The FCA was contacted by Sipps Professional but declined to comment.