In last week's reports on the Personal Pension Survey it was noted the second-ranked pension fund over a 10-year period was Friends First. In fact, the second-ranked company over that period was the unit-linked fund managed by Lifetime, the life assurance arm of Bank of Ireland, as illustrated in the accompanying table. Apologies to Lifetime, which joined the survey for the first time this year, as a result of its pension fund reaching its 10th anniversary.

Meanwhile, a new player has joined the already very competitive Irish pensions market: Scottish Legal Life, a company that has been selling life assurance products here for more than 100 years has just brought out a new pension fund which it claims will offer both flexibility and simplicity.

The company, which has more than £200 billion under management and 250,000 customers - most of them in Britain - will be making two of its existing fund management providers, Brittania and Perpetual, available to new Irish pension fund holders.