• Price and value assessments

Your firm’s obligations under the Consumer Duty rules

Under your firm’s obligations to meet the Consumer Duty rules, you must determine your own approach for assessing if the prices you charge for the services provided represent value for money.

Your firm is not responsible for carrying out a value assessment on the other elements of the distribution chain – such as platform fees – that’s the platform provider's responsibility.

As a platform provider, we’ll confirm at least once a year that the products we manufacture or distribute provide fair value to the customer. Please note we can only confirm on products we distribute if the information is available.

Our analysis

We’ve carried out separate assessments for Wrap, Elevate and Fundzone platforms. Following these assessments, we can confirm these abrdn solutions continue to provide fair value for your clients.

To establish this, we carried out these checks, using data @ 30 June 2022, where applicable:

Expense analysis - comparing the costs incurred by abrdn in manufacturing for Wrap, Elevate and Fundzone with the charges for the end customer, as well as considering our capital expenditure during this period and abrdn’s financial stability.

Competitor analysis - comparing the charges for Wrap, Elevate and Fundzone with those of comparable platforms in the advised market, while considering any differences in financial and non-financial benefits. This included consideration of:

  • platform charges
  • stockbroking and switch charges
  • ad hoc charges, and cash interest
  • abrdn’s award-winning service levels and commitment to market, as measured through financial strength. We have retained our AKG A rating.
Customer feedback - review of customer feedback, where relevant, from:
  • complaints
  • trends in outflows
  • customer and adviser research

Individual checks - analysis of advisers’ platform usage to identify any activity where the platform is not being used in the way it was intended.

This may lead to poor customer outcomes. Any trends in such activity are individually communicated for awareness to the adviser.

Vulnerable customers - focus on vulnerable customers processes, and any customer groups where outcomes may differ from the experience of other customers.

Annual analysis

Following this annual analysis, we’ll be continually improving our products and services to make sure that our abrdn solutions continue to provide fair value to the customer.

Fair value of products and services

Advisers may also be interested in the fair value of products and services distributed via our abrdn solutions. These cover:

  • Fund Manager and Discretionary Fund Manager charges
  • For Wrap only - Product administration charges and off-platform investment charges (where relevant) for Wrap SIPP, Offshore Bond and Onshore Bond, which are set by Standard Life Assurance Limited and Standard Life International dac (both companies being part of the Phoenix Group of companies (“Phoenix”)) as the manufacturer.

If you require a copy of our value assessment, please download a copy here.

For more information on the Consumer Duty’s price and value outcome

Read our Price and value outcome step-by-step guide

Phoenix - Price and Value assessment

Fund Manager and Discretionary Fund Manager Price and Value assessments

For Fund Manager and Discretionary Fund Manager Price and Value assessments, please see below or view their websites for information.

Should any of these parties indicate an issue with their Price and Value assessment, we’ll communicate this.