• New guide suggests best practice for advisers
  • The lang cat shares views on @sipp due diligence

Specialist self-invested pension provider @sipp has commissioned the lang cat to produce a guide to due diligence for the specialist SIPP market. ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love SIPP due diligence’, out today, examines best practice and includes tips to to help advisers get the most out of the process with minimal pain.

The paper, produced by the lang cat, aims to help advisers with what factors to consider when conducting due diligence among specialist SIPP providers. It has been designed to support advisers with their research and assessment of the market and identify points to challenge providers on.

As part of this process, the lang cat looked at @sipp’s responses through the lens it would typically use when carrying out due diligence on a provider for a client.  All the lang cat’s findings, along with its independent views, are included in a bid to illustrate how advisers might interpret responses given by providers.

Eddie McGuire, Managing Director @sipp comments:

“Having been saying for some time that the real challenge with due diligence across the specialist SIPP market is to look beyond the headline numbers, we felt it was time to put our money where our mouth was. Working with the lang cat gave us nowhere to hide but, crucially, it also offered expert insight into our business, the wider SIPP market and all the regulatory challenges on the horizon. Rightly so, this increased appeal brings more stringent regulation and greater scrutiny, but we need to ensure these challenges are interpreted correctly. And we think this guide will help achieve this.”

Commenting on the guide, the lang cat principal Mark Polson said:

“Due diligence isn’t about getting a sales brochure from a provider and neither should it be a forensic view of one aspect of a provider’s proposition or performance.”

“Instead of being a tick-box exercise, due diligence and suitability requires advisers to assess the market with an open mind and they must also be prepared to challenge the result of a provider’s responses in light of specific client needs. There’s no getting away from the level of research and detail that advisers must cover as part of this but what this report aims to prove is that with a robust process in place, due diligence, doesn’t have to be too daunting a task.”