Elevate PIA[

Elevate Pension Investment Account (Elevate PIA)
The Elevate PIA is a Self Invested Personal Pension Plan (SIPP) provided through the Elevate platform. A SIPP is a type of personal pension plan that gives access to a range of different investments. The Elevate PIA enables you to support your clients in building up their pension funds by offering a wide choice of investments.

The Elevate PIA is a single pension account which is made up of two registered pension schemes.

• Elevate Scheme No.1 for Non-Protected Rights
• Elevate Scheme No.2 for Protected Rights

Structuring the Elevate PIA in this way allows clients the flexibility to use the funds held under each of the two schemes either together or independently of each other when taking retirement benefits.

Clients will automatically join both schemes upon opening an Elevate PIA and there is no additional cost to the client for having two schemes. The Elevate PIA provides consistent investment choices across both schemes as permitted by legislation introduced in October 2008 in relation to Protected Rights.

There are three categories of investment options available through the Elevate PIA. These are cash, investment funds and securities.

The value of the Elevate PIA can fall as well as rise and is not guaranteed which mean clients could get back less than they put in.

Each Elevate PIA has its own PIA Cash from which charges and adviser remuneration are paid. PIA Cash also enables your clients to hold cash pending investment decisions or as an asset class of its own.

The charges taken from a client’s portfolio are used to cover the following:

• Elevate carrying out required transactions
• Adviser remuneration
• Third party invesment costs

Retirement
At retirement, when eligible, your clients have a choice of how they take income from their pension funds. They can either take an income directly from their Elevate PIA by choosing Unsecured Pension Drawdown (USP Drawdown) or buy a Lifetime Annuity from an annuity provider, or choose a combination of both.

• A client’s future pension income is not guaranteed. It depends on investment performance, charges, the level of any Pension Commencement Lump Sum (PCLS) and/or USP Drawdown taken and future annuity rates.
• There is no certainty that using a USP Drawdown will provide more income than if a Lifetime Annuity is purchased. It may provide less. And, compared to a Lifetime Annuity, the charges for USP Drawdown may be higher.
• The value of funds remaining after any income drawdown can fall as well as rise and is not guaranteed.

Pre-funded basic rate tax relief
The Elevate PIA is set up to make the full value of your clients’ contributions available for immediate investment. Any basic rate tax relief to which your client is entitled can, therefore, be invested as soon as the net contribution is paid into the Elevate PIA rather than when it is actually received from HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).

A client may be entitled to basic rate tax relief on their pension contributions, up to a limit set in each tax year by HMRC. Tax relief for basic rate tax payers for 2008/09 is 20%. So, if for example, a client chooses to invest a gross contribution of £10,000, they would only actually pay £8,000 with the additional £2,000 paid as tax relief by HMRC. The basic rate tax relief only applies to contributions made by a client or a third party on their behalf. It does not apply to payments made by an employer or to transfer payments. A higher rate tax payer may claim higher rate tax relief via their tax return.

Tax information is based on our understanding of current tax legislation. Tax legislation may change in the future

Illustrations
Illustrations are available online, and cover;
- opening an Elevate PIA,
- making additional payments into an existing Elevate PIA
- transferring in pension rights from another scheme; and
- moving funds to USP Drawdown.

Data entered for illustrations can be used to pre-populate large parts of the platform avoiding re-keying when actually opening an Elevate PIA.

Flexibility
The Elevate PIA offers flexibility in the selection of dates for your clients’ regular contributions into, or regular income withdrawals away from, the Elevate PIA. This flexibility makes it possible to accommodate your clients’ financial circumstances. For instance, you may wish to arrange for contributions to be made after pay days and for income withdrawals to be made prior to planned expenditure.

Transfers
The Elevate PIA accepts transfers from a variety of pension plans, for example Stakeholder Pension plans, Money Purchase and Defined Benefit Occupational Pension Schemes. It is also possible to transfer uncrystallised pension arrangements in and immediately crystallise them on the platform.

The minimum uncrystallised transfer value we will accept into the Elevate PIA is £1,000. Previous pension arrangements may offer valuable guarantees that the Elevate PIA cannot match. Benefits a client receives could be less than those they would have received under their previous arrangement. In particular, they may be too close to retirement to achieve sufficient growth for this plan to provide greater benefits.

Crystallise pension benefits
When your clients are eligible to start taking USP Drawdown the Elevate platform technology allows you to run ‘what if’ scenarios that allow you to analyse and test the effect of fully or partially crystallising their pension fund.

To make this analysis as straightforward as possible, the Elevate PIA offers asset valuations and automatically takes into account previous benefit selections and the GAD rates applicable to each client. The GAD rate, set by the Government Actuaries Department, is the rate used to calculate the maximum level of withdrawals a fund can support. Once your analysis is complete and the client has accepted your recommendations, all instructions in relation to taking benefits from their Elevate PIA are recorded directly onto the Elevate platform.

A Day Protection
The Elevate PIA supports all types of A-Day protection. The platform calculates and shows potential benefits, taking into account protection currently recorded on the platform.
 

Further information

• Single payments invested in the Elevate PIA must be at least £1,000 gross. Where regular payments are made the gross amount must be at least:
  - £100 monthly;
  - £300 quarterly;
  - £500 half yearly; or,
  - £1,000 yearly.
• The earliest time a client can take income from their pension fund is normally at age 55 (although before 2010 this is age 50).
• The minimum retirement fund required for USP Drawdown is £50,000 after any tax-free lump sum – PCLS - has been taken. For subsequent crystallisations the minimum is £1,000 after any PCLS has been paid.
• Income taken from the Elevate PIA by way of USP Drawdown is taxed as income through the PAYE system.