Best practice when creating new accounts

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• Features of the service
• How the service works
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• Initiating a pension stock transfer
• Best practice for new accounts

On creation of a new account, you may wish to bear the following points in mind to ensure each account is set up correctly:

• Once a new account has been established, you will need to set the investment strategy. This may involve the switching or selling of the assets that have been transferred and the selection of new investments or assigning of a model portfolio. Where a model portfolio is applied to a new account, a rebalance may be required.
• The natural income settings for a new account may need to be adjusted. By default, any natural income from investments will be set to be reinvested when you use the Stock Transfer process to create a new account.
• The adviser ongoing fee rate is carried over from the original account to the new account – you may need to adjust this depending on what you have agreed with your client. An ongoing DFM fee may also need to be set up (this rate is not carried over to the new account). In addition, please review the cash and investment settings to ensure fees can be paid.
• For Pension Savings Accounts, a regular saving plan may need to be created for the new account. If you need to run multiple regular savings plans from different employers, you can do this by creating a second account and running them separately. Likewise, if you need to run regular savings plans where the employee and employer contributions are from the same source bank account, this can be done by creating a second account and running the plans separately (one as an employer plan and one as an employee plan).
• For Pension Drawdown Accounts, a pension taxable income plan can be created on an account in a Pension Arrangement. Please review the cash and investment settings to ensure there are enough investments to make sure the ongoing pension income can be paid (if applicable).
• Be careful not to accidentally open a second Pension Drawdown Arrangement when completing a Crystallisation or Transfer to Immediate Drawdown process. Crystallise into an existing account for future flexibility so you can move the investments between accounts
• When transferring to immediate drawdown, crystallise into an existing Pension Drawdown Account where one exists for maximum future flexibility.
• If a client holds a Standard Life Guaranteed Lifetime Income plan, each tranche remains in the account from which they are purchased. For any subsequent purchases, it may be best to buy this new tranche within the same account that holds the original tranche.
• Consider running £ based adviser fees in a separate account for the pensions, especially where a DFM is used on other accounts and the DFM fee is set as a percentage, as long as these are within the rules for permitted fees.
• Sell assets from the Standard Life Smoothed Return Pension Fund if cash is required to be moved from this fund into another account.