Putting pensions online - a tricky business?

Financial services provider AJ Bell is the first UK company to put pension schemes online to let people manage and invest their own pension funds.

The company launched the UK's first online Self Invested Personal Pensions (Sipp) - a pension product that gives customers the tax benefits of stakeholder pension while allowing them to manage funds themselves.

A Sipp can involve the purchase of property, shares and government bonds as investments towards a pension.

Ian Coulson, IT director of AJ Bell, told silicon.com the company needed a system it could rely on "as a lot of things are going on when someone is managing a Sipp online" and reliability of the data across the network was key.

But Coulson said the main concern about putting Sipps online was security.

With a range of rules and regulations surrounding how someone can invest in a Sipp - and the usual security worries about going online - AJ Bell chose Cisco network security technology to introduce its first online Sipp offering, called Sippdeal.

Coulson told silicon.com: "Cisco offered an environment that would not hinder the company as the business grows."

This was especially important in the case of Sippdeal. As the first online Sipp offering, "no one was really sure of exactly the direction it would go and where it would take us so having a systems network that could adapt to how the market responded was crucial", Coulson added.

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AJ Bell subsequently launched a version of Sippdeal for Independent Financial Advisors (IFAs) called Sippcentre.

Coulson said: "IFAs, through customer feedback, told AJ Bell that Sippdeal did not quite fit with their business model so Sippcentre was born to facilitate the IFAs.

"The high quality of the system means we are not worried about the quality of the product you're putting in - it'll do the job and it'll do the job well."

AJ Bell is the UK's third largest Sipp operator, with assets valued at more than £3bn under the company's trusteeship.