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How does Penfold compare to other providers?
How does Penfold compare to other providers?

Discover what makes us different to other pension providers

Ellie Lister avatar
Written by Ellie Lister
Updated over a week ago

Let’s face it - pensions can be overwhelming. Knowing who to place your money with for your future isn’t a small decision and the jargon that is often involved with pensions can send your head into a spin. That’s fundamentally why Pete, Chris & Stuart set up Penfold - to strip away the things that make it complicated, leave the complex jargon at the door and make it simple to get your pension set up. But why pick them over the other digital finance providers out there? Let’s break it down.

Inclusive of everybody

  • Whilst we have designed our pension around the self-employed after not having the luxury of an HR department to sort it for them, any and everyone can set up a pension with Penfold. Employees, limited company directors, freelancers, small business owners, aspiring entrepreneurs - you’re all welcome here.

  • Pensions are an amazing investment, with exceptional tax benefits that have too long been complicated by jargon, paperwork and dinosaur providers. That’s why we’re a completely online, no-jargon safe zone, here to simplify all the boring pension chat into tangible answers for everyone

100% flexible

  • Pause whenever you like - we understand the ebbs and flows of our customer’s income and with no catch, allow you to pause your contributions at any time. You can just pick them back up again when you’re ready!

  • Reduce, increase your payment amount or change your date at any time. Or make one off top-ups of any size you like for no extra cost

One, very simple fee

  • We hate hidden fees and you probably do too. It's only when you come to withdraw that a provider springs on you that there's an extra withdrawal fee, or there's an exit charge...

  • We want to keep this as easy and straight-forward as possible, so we have removed all extra fees, except for the all-in annual fee of 0.75% (or 0.88% for the Sharia plan) of the total amount you have saved up in your Penfold pension. This is the only fee you'll ever pay for Penfold, we believe this is the way it should be!

  • We’ll automatically deduct a portion of your annual fee from your pension in 12 monthly installments

  • If your pension pot size is larger than £100,000 the fee is reduced to 0.4% (or 0.53% for the Sharia plan) on the portion of your savings over this amount

  • The Sharia plan fee is inclusive of a 0.2% subsidy from Penfold, following the restructure of the underlying HSBC fund, which will expire on August 30th 2023. We are currently working on extending this or finding another fund at the same price, but the fees on this plan may increase. We will provide at least one month notice for any such change.

Easy transfers

  • We’ve made it easy for you to transfer your old pension pots into Penfold, no paperwork on our side… and completely for free!

We’ve got good friends

  • We’re building partnerships with the brands and businesses we know you like to integrate with, to make it even easier for you to save, manage your returns and remove a bit of financial stress from your already busy schedule

  • Starling customer? We’ve integrated with Starling to allow you to set up and manage easily from your Starling dashboard

5* customer service

  • We’re still a young company and listen to EVERY word our customer says. Any issues that arise are quickly resolved, feedback is crucial and always taken on board, and requests for new integrations, offerings and services from our customers are taken completely seriously. You’re with us for the long haul (hopefully) so we want to make this a great space for you!

  • Don’t believe us? We’ll let our reviews speak for themselves

Investment options

  • Have you ever been worried about investing because you're just unsure about how it works? We make investing work for everyone by making it as easy as possible for our customers. We will not bombard you with lots of options & investing jargon. Rather, we offer 6 carefully chosen portfolios that are low in cost, diversified and have performed exceptionally well over the last year

  • We also have launched our new Sustainable and Shariah compliant plans, to add to our other four investment options! You can select these as you're setting up your Penfold pension.

If you've got any questions, please reach out to us on email here.

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