STAR, the industry collaboration initiative, has launched a provider accreditation scheme aimed at tackling delays in savings, investment and pension transfers.

Accreditation is available for platforms, providers, life companies, service providers, transfer agents and asset managers.

Firms can volunteer to participate.

So far 76 firms have signed up to STAR, with 18 being accredited so far.

The participating firms share their management information over a period of nine months to receive an accreditation based on performance assessed across a range of key performance indicators and overall transfer times.

Points are awarded across key areas including the average number of days to transfer a customer’s assets, how they communicate with customers on that journey and what percentage of electronic transfers were reported for the accreditation.

The average ceding party times were 12.7 days for ISAs, 14.8 days for GIA, 12.7 days for Personal Pensions, SIPPs and SSAS and 21.9 days for occupational pensions.

Asset management firms provided full management information and 99.4% of reported asset re-registrations were completed within two fund calendar days.

Rob Yuille, assistant director and head of long term savings policy at the Association of British Insurers, said: “Transfers are a key part of good customer service and healthy competition. People will only transfer pensions and investments a few times in their lives, so it is really important to get it right, for each customer’s experience, for each firm’s reputation and that of the whole industry.

“Smoother transfers can only be achieved through collaboration, so STAR’s accreditation framework, spanning different types of pensions and investments, is a big step forward and builds on the improvements to transfers delivered by the industry over the years.

“To continue to improve, we encourage more firms to participate in STAR, to measure performance transparently, based on evidence of outcomes and a common understanding of good practice across the whole industry.”

The STAR initiative is backed by the Government and is comprised of two not-for-profit organisations, Criterion and TeX.

• Editor's Note 22.11.22: Due to incorrect supply of figures, the ceding party times quoted for Personal Pensions, SIPPs and SSAS and occupational pensions in the first version of this story were incorrect. They have now been corrected in the story above. Apologies for the errors.

Apologies, please could we issue a correction to the figures quoted in your STAR accreditation article. The figures should read:

• Personal Pension, SIPP, SSAS = 12.7 days
• Occupational Pensions = 21.9 days