One platform that offers Sipps is AXA Elevate. Andy Zanelli, head of retirement planning at AXA Wealth, says the platform provides advisers with the functionality to manage retirement benefits in real-time and to make immediate withdrawals and income payments.
The Table additionally looks at a plan’s minimum initial investment, lump sum and monthly investments. It also asks providers if they offer online valuations. Although this may not be a necessary component, it is still somewhat surprising that there are many providers who do not offer it.
Table 2 covers the data detailing any growth the Sipp industry has seen. In 2013, there had been 99,460 set up in the previous 12 months – April this year saw 115,787 new Sipps – but this year’s survey shows just 92,012 plans were set up, but far fewer Sipps were lost this year than in previous surveys.
Just 3,459 Sipps were lost, while in previous years this figure has been around the 6,000 mark. As with last year, Hargreaves Lansdown contributed a large proportion of new Sipps, reporting more than 37,000 set up, although its figure is as from 31 March 2014 so is slightly skewed against other respondents. Aviva and Standard Life also both contributed a large number of new Sipps, with 14,343 and 13,683 respectively.
Compared with April 2014’s survey, the number of new Sipps set up fell by 20 per cent, although when looking at the same period last year, this survey shows a fall of just 7 per cent.
Previous years have seen providers reluctant to detail how many Sipps they have within each type of plan – this year open architecture or platform-integrated – but this year, the majority of providers responded to this question, showing 402,158 of Sipps are platform integrated and 196,103 plans are now classified open architecture. This is detailed in Chart 2, which shows a market breakdown by the number of Sipps drawn from Table 2, showing 67 per cent are platform integrated and 33 per cent open architecture. For those that did not respond, it may be the case that there are no official regulator definitions of what a Sipp is classified as, and many smaller firms do not have the technological capacities to make such calculations.
The Charts shows that platform-intergrated Sipps are much more popular with investors, despite the prevalence of open-architecture schemes.
Dramatic growth
Table 2 also shows that as well as the total number of Sipps set up, the total value in force has also grown dramatically. It now stands at £128bn – while in October 2013’s survey the total value was £101bn – with an average Sipp value of £242,575. This shows the Sipp market is increasing over the years and in advance of April’s changes to the pension industry. The average has increased on the last survey’s figure of £234,792, but varies dramatically across the board. The highest average Sipp value is from the JLT Personal Pension trust, with an average Sipp value of £1.1m, which isn’t a surprise considering JLT is one of the largest employee benefit providers and it caters its Sipps towards financial directors of firms. The Liverpool Victoria Sipp has an average Sipp value of £53,000 and Hargreaves Lansdown sits at £70,679.
