Happy birthdays for Dentons and SIPP!

In the year that the SIPP industry is celebrating reaching its 30 year anniversary, Dentons is celebrating its own birthday – of 40 years!

We have grown from our small beginnings in 1979 when Dentons entered the SSAS market with just a handful of staff, to today where we have over 100 staff administering in excess of 6000 SIPPs, nearly 800 SSASs and over 2600 commercial properties.

In 1979, the world was a different place with a population of just 4.37 billion. Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, Martina Navratilova beat Chris Evert Lloyd at Wimbledon and the most popular car was the Ford Cortina. It also snowed in the Sahara desert for 30 minutes in February 1979 – the only known time in history!

So what has changed in the last 40 years?

Although the SIPP concept was created 10 years later, the first SIPPs took time to appear with Dentons entering the SIPP market in 1996. SSASs have now survived for over 40 years and despite some challenging times, they continue to exist and have an important place in financial planning. We expect SIPPs will have an equally long lifespan.

Over its 40 year history, Dentons has remained true to its core objectives of providing a quality service and putting client interests at the heart of everything we do.

The company strives to use the most up-to-date technology to improve the service it offers to its clients. This has seen the development of the Dentons online portal – allowing clients and advisers to see client portfolio information including most recent valuations, along with speeding up the application process through online forms and the use of digital signatures, where applicable.

Today is a different world from 40 years ago.

There are now over 7.5 billion people in the world, the UK is held in a Brexit deadlock, total internet users across the world exceed 4 billion – over half of the population, and social media has become an integral part of many people’s everyday life. However, the most popular car is still a Ford – now a Focus or Fiesta.

In recent press articles, the talk is about the evolution of the SIPP to the present day as it celebrates its 30th birthday this month and the messages are mostly very positive that self invested pensions will see another 30 years of growth. At Dentons, we too are positive about continuing to service our clients’ self invested pensions long into the future.