Unregulated collective investment schemes

An unregulated collective investment scheme is a type of collective investment scheme (CIS). They are also known as 'non-mainstream pooled investments'.

A collective investment scheme (CIS) is a fund where investors pool their money to invest and share any growth or income.

A UCIS isn’t subject to the same requirements as a scheme that’s regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). This means it may be a higher-risk investment that’s unlikely to be suitable for many investors.

Find out more about UCIS, and who they're suitable for, on the FCA website.

In most cases, you can complain to us about a service or product that’s regulated by the FCA.

The FCA doesn’t regulate UCIS, but it does regulate:

• financial advice about UCIS
• providers of ‘self-invested personal pensions’ (SIPP) who may include UCIS in their products
• investment firms who operate UCIS from the UK.

Because UCIS are likely to be high risk, financial advisers are only allowed to promote them to wealthy or more experienced investors. So, if you’re unhappy about advice that an FCA-regulated financial adviser gave you to invest in a UCIS, we may be able to help. 

We can’t help with complaints about investment firms that manage UCIS if they operate overseas, because they – and the investments they manage – won’t be FCA regulated.

To find out whether a firm is FCA regulated, search the FCA Register.

Most people who invest in a UCIS do so through a SIPP. Your pension provider has a duty to assess whether the UCIS is an appropriate asset for a SIPP to hold, before accepting the investment.

We hear complaints from people who:

• are unhappy with advice they were given, including to transfer their pension to a SIPP so that they could invest in a UCIS
• believe that the checks a pension provider carried out, to assess whether it was right for their SIPP, weren’t good enough
• have issues with valuing and trading the UCIS, such as:
  • not being allowed to cash in the investment, or
  • being charged SIPP fees when there’s not enough cash in the SIPP because most of their pension pot is tied up in a UCIS investment.

Our service is free and easy to use. 

1. Before bringing your complaint to us, you should make a formal complaint to the company involved.
2. If they don't send you a final response letter within eight weeks – or you're unhappy with their response – you can complain to us.
3. Our complaint checker will tell you more about some of the things we need to know before we start investigating, and it will help you make sure you’re ready to send us your complaint.
4. Fill in our online complaint form. Your case will be assigned to a case handler who will get in touch when they start to investigate.
5. To help us consider a complaint fairly, we may ask you to provide more information.

Use our complaint checker

We’ll look into the complaint using evidence from you, the financial business and any relevant third parties. To reach a decision, we'll also consider:  

• the relevant law, regulations and industry codes of conduct that applied at the time 
• whether the financial adviser or pension provider did everything they required when giving you advice or administering your SIPP, and if not, whether you’ve lost out as a result
• the impact of what's happened on you, for example, on your life or retirement income.

We'll tell you whether we believe you've been treated fairly or not and explain how we reached our decision. And we'll tell the financial adviser or pensions company to put things right if we think you've lost money because:

• you received the wrong investment advice, or
• your SIPP has been badly administered.

What we'll say will depend on the nature of the complaint, but for example, we might ask the business to:

• pay you compensation for any financial loss
• to buy the UCIS in your SIPP, if possible, so that you can close the pension arrangement altogether
• do things differently for you in the future, and
• where appropriate, pay you compensation for any distress or inconvenience you have suffered.

What to expect