Scottish Widows, a mutual life insurer, has added new retirement income functionality to its flagship pension product, Retirement Account.
The proposed enhancement will enable customers to draw down an income from their Retirement Account. The new functionality is hosted on the same platform as the retirement planning element of the Retirement Account, making it easy for the customer’s adviser to manage their client’s money.
Scottish Widows said that the Retirement Account has a number of advantages that makes it stand out from self-invested personal plans (SIPPs) and other pension products available. It has total transparency with unbundled charging structure, has no initial charge on any funds, including those accessed through the Retirement Account’s fund supermarket and allows access to over 1000 funds – with no charging bias to in-house.
Iain McGowan, head of retirement income and planning division at Scottish Widows, said: Adding the drawdown capability of retirement income means that the Scottish Widows’s Retirement Account now provides the complete retirement planning solution within a single plan.