AJ Bell has announced the launch of a new ‘Ready-made’ pension and consolidation service, in an effort to help savers track down lost pensions and keep better track of their retirement savings for the future.

Linking to the pension finding tool launched by AJ Bell last year, the pension is designed to enable customers to track down their pensions and automatically combine them into a simple, low-cost pension account.

The service finds pensions based on the name of the customer’s former employer or the name of the provider they opened the pension with, although AJ Bell clarified that not all pensions can be found and combined this way and some can’t be transferred without financial advice.

Once their pension pots have been moved to the Ready-made pension, customers can access their account through the AJ Bell platform on a browser or mobile app.

The annual charge on the pension is 0.45 per cent, and covers both the AJ Bell platform service and fund charges for three AJ Bell growth funds, with no additional charges for buying or selling investments.

The three growth funds cater for different investor requirements, cautious, balanced and adventurous, alongside an additional responsible investing option which costs 0.60 per cent per annum. The pension will also offer auto-investment.

AJ Bell said that, as the pension finding and consolidation service is included in the all-in-one fee, the service is thought to be “one of the cheapest pension finding and consolidation products available to UK savers”.

Commenting on the launch, AJ Bell managing director, Charlie Musson, said: “Getting to grips with your pensions is something that a lot of people have on their ‘to do’ list, but never quite get round to.

“Whether it’s a crumpled-up pension statement stuffed in a drawer or a long-forgotten enrolment pack handed to you when starting work at a new company, the prospect of tracking down your pension accounts and getting them in one place feels like a dreary job.

“Our new Ready-made pension service takes away the hassle, automatically finding all your pensions and combining them into an easy, low-cost account.

“Combining pensions into a single Ready-made pension account will allow customers to see all their retirement savings in one place, with their money being managed by our expert investment team. This will massively simplify retirement saving for those customers, taking the hard work out of managing multiple pension accounts.”

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