Has a company treated you unfairly? Our Consumer Champion is available to help. For how to contact her click here.
Dear Katie,
I have been trying to move my pension with Phoenix Life over to a Fidelity Sipp for over a year after having been given a transfer value of £86,000. However, the pension has still not yet been moved.
Most of the correspondence I have had with Phoenix Life has been ignored, or responded to via an automated email response.
Fidelity has contacted it several times to request that the funds be transferred, but still nothing has been done. I also had an email from Fidelity on June 12 this year saying that the funds would be in the Fidelity account on June 15. But still, nothing has been transferred.
On the last call I had with Phoenix Life (on the rare occasion I can get through) I was promised it would ring me back the next day on my mobile phone. No phone call was made.
Now, I have had correspondence from Phoenix Life to say that my funds are going to be transferred to a separate entity called Phoenix Life Limited, which I find unbelievable.
Aside from being denied the opportunity to invest my funds, which has probably lost me a lot of money, I am also worried as to what the implications would be on my estate if I die before the funds are transferred.
At this rate, I probably would be dead before receiving any money.
Phoenix Life has my pension fund and clearly has no intention of transferring it to Fidelity, but every intention of transferring it to Phoenix Life Limited against my wishes. To me, it feels like theft.
I don’t know where to go from here as I am being completely ignored.
CP, via email
Dear reader,
It turns out you had two pension policies with Phoenix Life, both of which you requested to transfer to Fidelity last year.
Despite this, Phoenix Life told me it only received one request, meaning this £86,000 pension had been left behind, while your other policy was transferred across.
A Phoenix Life spokesman said: “We are very sorry for the delays Mrs P has experienced with her transfer and that we did not identify earlier that only one transfer request had been received.
“As part of our investigations we have found that there were two individual errors in our technical and processing areas that when combined have led to this poor customer outcome for Mrs P. We have delivered remedial training to members of staff to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
Following my intervention Phoenix Life is now working with Fidelity to transfer your pension as an urgent priority.
It is paying you £1,000 in compensation and has agreed to top up your pension if it finds your Fidelity pension would have lost money over the period in question, so its own failings won’t cause you to be worse off.
You were told by the complaints manager that “this is not the level of service Phoenix Life wants its customers to experience”, however, with a staggering 68pc of one-star reviews on TrustPilot, you have a hunch you may not be alone in your dissatisfaction.
