ReAssure Limited · DRN-5515274

The complaint Mr M complains about ReAssure Limited. He’s unhappy ReAssure provided him with incorrect information about the value of his drawdown fund. What happened Mr M originally held his pension with another pension provider. 2015: Beginning with a plan value of around £75,000, Mr M withdrew around £19,000 as part of his tax-free cash entitlement, leaving a plan value of around £56,000. 2017: Mr M withdrew £9,000 from his plan, leaving a plan value of around £45,000. 2019: Mr M’s original pension provider transferred its pension business to ReAssure. As part of this the proceeds of Mr M’s plan were transferred to ReAssure’s Retirement Account plan. 2020: ReAssure issued an annual statement to Mr M, confirming that his plan value was over £54,000 on 1 September 2020 and over £58,000 on 2 December 2020. 2021: ReAssure issued an annual statement to Mr M, confirming that his plan value was over £58,000 on 29 December 2020 and over £67,000 on 2 December 2021. 2022: Mr M made regular monthly withdrawals of £1,350 until September 2024. He also made two one-off withdrawals for £5,500 and £3,500. January – March 2023: Mr M made three withdrawals totalling around £9,700. ReAssure issued an annual statement to Mr M on 14 March 2023 confirming that his plan value was over £58,000 on 13 June 2022 and over £51,000 on 17 March 2023. April 2023: ReAssure issued Mr M’s regular monthly withdrawal twice in error. Given the choice been returning or keeping the extra payment, Mr M chose to keep it. February 2024: ReAssure confirmed Mr M’s plan value had been just over £51,000 on 17 March 2023 and was just over £49,000 on 8 February 2024. Mr M made a one-off withdrawal of £10,250 on 19 February 2024 and ReAssure later confirmed his plan value was just over £39,000. October 2024: Mr M checked his plan value online but having expected it to be around £26,000, he was shocked to discover that it was under £8,000. To preserve his plan value, Mr M contacted ReAssure to reduce his regular monthly withdrawal from £1,350 to £325. After various back and forth, Mr M’s request was referred to ReAssure’s actuarial team which highlighted that Mr M’s new monthly income request would exhaust his fund within a few months.

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On 29 October 2024, ReAssure wrote to Mr M confirming that his plan value was just over £1,100. On 31 October 2024, Mr M complained about the value of his plan and conflicting information ReAssure had provided him with. November 2024: ReAssure acknowledged Mr M’s request to take his pension as lump sum. On 4 November 2024, Mr M chased ReAssure for forms which would allow him to take the rest of his plan as a lump sum. These were issued the same day. December 2024: Mr M clarified his complaint in writing. In summary he said: • He’d checked his fund value in October 2024 and expecting it to be around £26,000, was shocked to discover it was under £8,000. • It took several weeks of being given incorrect information before ReAssure explained that due to his plan value being close to running out, the reduction couldn’t go ahead. • ReAssure agreed to recheck his pension value and call him back the same day but this didn’t happen. And when it did call back, it confirmed his value had dropped to around £1,100. Shocked by what he’d been told, Mr M requested paperwork so he could withdraw his remaining funds as soon as possible. January 2025: ReAssure sent its final response to Mr M’s complaint. In summary it said: • It provided incorrect plan values in its letters, suggesting Mr M’s plan value was higher than it was. And it took too long to provide him with correct information when he requested it. • Its online portal used data from its system to provide Mr M with up-to-date policy information, but a system error was preventing it from providing correct values online. Until the system issue was resolved, values provided for Mr M’s plan online might be incorrect and it couldn’t confirm when this would be resolved. In the meantime, Mr M could request information he needed via phone, email, or secure message. • Its online portal was a propositional service and not a contractual one, so it reserved the right to remove or suspend access to it at any time. It couldn’t confirm how long it would take to restore accurate information via its portal. • Although it tried to contact Mr M in October 2024 about his request to reduce his regular income, it failed to ask him for the information it needed when he called it back and didn’t attempt to return the call. It also delayed issuing Mr M’s lump sum application form. • It appreciated Mr M’s frustration, but recent values had been checked by its actuarial team and were correct. • It apologised, and for the inconvenience its error caused, paid Mr M £500. Unhappy with ReAssure’s response, Mr M referred his complaint to our Service. Before our Investigator had considered the complaint, ReAssure made a proactive settlement offer. While it had made a payment of £500 for distress and inconvenience Mr M suffered, it was offering a further £750 for loss of expectation, bringing total compensation to £1,250. Mr M didn’t accept the offer and asked our Investigator to continue looking at his complaint. In summary, he said:

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• Having received his plan value from ReAssure in early 2024, he’d taken the figure he’d received at face value. Based on this, he and his wife had long discussions about their future plans. • Decisions had been made after careful consideration about what his plan value would by the end of August 2024, so he was in disbelief when almost all his funds had disappeared in just over seven months. • He’d been left shocked and distressed by ReAssure’s error and was struggling to see a way forward. • It was difficult for him to understand how things had gone wrong and when as ReAssure had provided little information. One of our Investigators considered the matter and concluded that ReAssure’s revised compensation offer was fair given what happened. While she understood Mr M’s frustration, she didn’t think he was entitled to the incorrect plan values ReAssure provided and based on Mr M’s fund value in 2015 and the withdrawals he’d made, Mr M appeared to have received what he was entitled to. Mr M responded, saying he struggled to understand how ReAssure had managed to get things wrong for such a long time. He outlined the various plans he and his wife had made based on incorrect values ReAssure had provided in writing and disagreed that the compensation offered was fair. What I’ve decided – and why I’ve considered all the available evidence and arguments to decide what’s fair and reasonable in the circumstances of this complaint. Having done so and based on what I’ve seen, I won’t be directing ReAssure to do anything further. I’ll explain why. But before I do, I should emphasise that while I’ve taken serious note of the correspondence and comments made by both parties, I have limited my response to what I consider to be the issues central to this complaint. There isn’t any dispute about the fact that ReAssure made an error. It’s clear to me it overstated the value of Mr M’s plan for several years and unfairly raised his expectations. Specifically, the annual statements ReAssure issued and the online valuations it made available indicated that Mr M had a higher level of retirement provision in place than he did. Understandably Mr M has found it difficult to come to terms with what happened and make sense of how things went so wrong. What happened Mr M’s plan allowed him to take the proceeds of his pension flexibly as one-off or regular withdrawals while leaving his remaining funds invested. When Mr M withdrew funds at different levels and irregular intervals these payments fell outside ReAssure’s normal, automated systems and required it to process his withdrawals and calculate his plan value manually. This isn’t unusual on plans like Mr M’s. Although the necessary calculations for Mr M’s plan value took place, a system error prevented his online account from accessing the data required so his correct plan value was consistently reflected online and in statements. ReAssure hasn’t been able to pinpoint exactly when this became an issue, but it suggests it may date back to 2019 when Mr M’s original pension provider transferred its pension business to it. This seems likely based on what I’ve seen.

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At some point, data from the manual calculations carried out on Mr M’s plan was reconciled with his online account, which resulted in what appeared to be a sudden and significant drop in his pension value. Mr M has expressed concern about charges being applied to his plan based on its value when it was inflated, but I haven’t seen any evidence of this. Explicit charges (for example, policy fees) which are taken from a plan value don’t apply to Mr M’s plan. The implicit charges (for example, annual management charges and investment management charges) that do apply are taken from the daily prices of units and applied manually by the same team which manually calculated Mr M’s correct plan value. The charges weren’t based on the incorrect values which appeared online and in statements. Compensation ReAssure accepts that its mistakes and delays shouldn’t have happened and that it caused Mr M inconvenience and frustration. And in increasing its compensation offer from £500 to £1250 it has also sought to recognise the loss of expectation Mr M experienced. The issue I must decide is whether the action ReAssure has taken satisfactorily resolves the matter and sufficiently compensates Mr M for the distress and inconvenience caused by what happened. In a situation like this, we aim to, as closely as possible, put consumers back in the position they would have been in, had the correct information been given, rather than a business being bound by the incorrect information it did give. So, for Mr M, the correct information is that he’s entitled to the revised plan value ReAssure’s actuarial team calculated most recently and not the overstated values he was previously given. Because of this I can’t say ReAssure must honour the misleading valuations it provided. These were based on incorrect information. I should say that based on what I’ve seen, especially the period over which the error occurred and how irregularly income was being taken, I don’t think Mr M was in much of a position to notice the error for himself. As Mr M has said, he took reasonable confidence from the values he was being given by ReAssure over the years and made financial decisions based on them. It’s unfortunate it took so long for ReAssure to identify the error and correct it. Had reasonable checks been carried out earlier and Mr M been informed of the mistake, I think it’s reasonable to expect that he may have revised his 2024 plans and changed the level of income he was taking from his plan sooner and mitigated his position. He was deprived of the opportunity to do this for some time. Mr M withdrew certain levels of income from his plan over several years based on information ReAssure made available that wasn’t correct. As the value of his plan was overstated Mr M wasn’t able to make fully informed decisions about the amount of money he was withdrawing or what he was choosing to do with it. Mr M has also experienced a loss of expectation around the level of financial security he thought he’d have in place based on what he was led to believe his plan value was. Believing his plan value would be around £26,000 by the end of 2024, Mr M and his wife, after careful consideration, decided to make relatively high withdrawals in earlier years to lay the foundations for their future plans.

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Mr M has had to deal with the shock, inconvenience, and disappointment of having to rethink and change not only his retirement plans but also his wife’s, and more generally their standard of living. And now that it’s clear the value of Mr M’s plan isn’t what he was led to believe it was, he’s been put in a position where he has to make adjustments in ways he wouldn’t otherwise have had to were it not for ReAssure’s error. I’m also conscious of the time and energy Mr M put into querying his plan value and trying to take corrective action in the early stages of the error becoming apparent. ReAssure acknowledges that it was slow to react and provide answers during this time. I have real sympathy for Mr M and can appreciate how upsetting it will have been when ReAssure’s mistake came to light. It’s clear to me that having correct information about the value of his plan was very important. Taking account of what happened, including our Service’s guidelines for awards for distress and inconvenience, I think it’s entirely appropriate that ReAssure offered Mr M the level of compensation it did. It represents a fair amount given the seriousness of ReAssure’s error and its impact and is in line with what I’d have been asking it to pay if no award had been made. It’s also in keeping with the level of awards our Service would usually recommend for an error which has caused considerable upset and has lasting impact as has been the case here. I’m aware that Mr M feels ReAssure’s compensation offer isn’t sufficient. This has clearly been very upsetting and I understand dealing with the matter will have been stressful. But having carefully considered everything, I do think £1,250 compensation is the appropriate award in these circumstances. And I’m not persuaded to award a higher sum. While I’m not directing ReAssure to award the level of compensation Mr M might like, I should say that I do think it’s entirely reasonable for him to expect ReAssure to provide correct information. And it’s unfortunate that in this case that didn’t happen. I am genuinely sorry to hear of the impact that this has had on Mr M. I don’t underestimate or doubt Mr M’s sincerity or strength of feeling in bringing his complaint to this service and I understand that my decision may come as a disappointment to him. My final decision For the above reasons, my final decision is that I uphold Mr M’s complaint in part. ReAssure Limited has already paid Mr M £500. I find its offer to pay Mr M a further £750 bringing total compensation to £1,250 fair in all the circumstances. So, my decision is that ReAssure Limited should pay Mr M £750. Under the rules of the Financial Ombudsman Service, I’m required to ask Mr M to accept or reject my decision before 27 March 2026. Chillel Bailey Ombudsman

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