What is a Pension and Investment Platform?
Published / Last Updated on 14/05/2025
Some of you may have heard of pension and investment platforms, many may not have and some do not even know that is where their pension, ISA or general investment account (GIA) is held.
Ice Cream:
You can either have
- A plain vanilla ice cream and cone.
- A raspberry ripple ice cream with different sauces, chocolate sprinkles or a chocolate flake or ‘hundreds & thousands’ sweet little sugar pieces or jellies in a cone, tub, ice cream sandwich, double cone, ‘knickerbocker glory’ or glass dish or even a ‘banana boat’.
Food Shopping:
You can either shop at
- The local pasty store and buy a Cornish pasty or a sausage roll.
- You could go to a supermarket or hypermarket and buy pasties, pies, bread, cakes, sandwiches, soft drinks, alcohol, meat, tinned veggies, sauces, pet food, cleaning products, frozen food, condiments, jams/preserves, milk, eggs, clothing, baby products and even electrical goods. Even then, there will be different brands available for each product line, there may be 5 different brands of tomato ketchup or baked beans or toilet roll to choose from.
Investment:
This is the same for pensions and investment plans. You can either invest via:
- A ‘plain vanilla’ pension or investment scheme with say only the pension company’s own funds available for you to invest in.
- A ‘pensions and investment supermarket’ and invest via a platform in a range of hundreds, if not thousands or different funds, from many different pension/investment fund managers. E.g., there may be 30-50 different UK stock market funds or European funds compared to just one of each in the plain ‘vanilla’ pension/investment.
An investment platform is a funds 'hypermarket' for your pensions and investments.
Charges:
- A plain vanilla pension or investment will usually have lower charges as you may expect ranging from say 0.3% to 1.0% pa only plus another 0.5% to 1.0% pa adviser charge.
- A platform-based pension or investment will usually have higher charges as you may expect ranging from say 0.3% pa for the platform, 0.3% to 1.0% pa for the fund manager and another 0.5% to 1.0% pa adviser charge.
- We do not charge % based ongoing adviser fees, we charge optional fixed ongoing advice fees meaning more of your hard-earned money stays in your pension or investment for growth.
You can opt for cheaper ‘plain vanilla’ and keep it simple, or you can pay a little more for more choice. What if your UK Equity fund in your ‘plain vanilla’ pension is not performing that well? You have little choice but with your platform scheme, you pay more but you may have 30/50 or even 100 different UK equity funds to compare and choose from.
