By Richard Harris

LONDON (Citywire) - Standard Life is in the process of correcting 35,000 of its customers' portfolios after a bug in an internal pricing and administration platform introduced last year caused errors in the prices of some of its pensions and investment funds.

A small number of customers who transferred money in or out of Standard Life investments before the error was noticed were underpaid, and have been written to and compensated in circumstances where the underpayment exceeded 10 pounds, a spokesperson said.

The company was unable to specify the number of customers who were underpaid or how significantly, but said it was a small minority and that most had been underpaid by small amounts.

The majority of customers did not suffer a tangible loss as the error was an internal one, and 99.5% of records have already been corrected according to Standard Life. Those customers who have not yet been notified will be written to by the end of September.

Standard Life said the error had gone unnoticed until several months ago, but pledged to prevent similar errors taking place in future.

‘We are aware that errors with unit pricing can impact both intermediary and customer confidence and want to reassure our customers that we have put in place further quality assurance controls and we are continuing to review our processes to significantly reduce the likelihood of this happening again,' the spokesperson said.

(c) Citywire Financial Publishers Ltd 2008.