Well I checked out AES International (and I notice there is no shortage of complaints about their advice from disgruntled customers) and they show no prices for their services - in fact they seem more interested in managing your QROPS account rather than just setting it up - but I cant for the life of me believe that they will go to all the effort of setting up a QROPS account for £150 (or anywhere near that figure). If they were that cheap that would raise warning flags by itself.
What did strike me from reading about AES was this comment from one of their employees:
"After an initial 3 month training period you are immediately given levels of autonomy and responsibility found no where else in the financial services industry as a graduate."
so bearing in mind that their staff are paid on commission like the rest of the industry I somehow doubt that their advice will be any better/worse than Deveres.
Post a link to the specific product that you bought and let us all have a stab at estimating the true costs.
Well my QROPS account is with Sovereign in Guernsey, they charge a quarterly management fee of £96 and £15 for each buy/sell transaction.
https://www.sovereigngroup.com/pensions/guernsey/
I tend to keep a lot of cash in my QROPS account so the buy/sell fees are insignificant. As far as products go my priority for this account is capital preservation so that rules out tracker funds (I dont like to use managed open funds), therefore I went with Structured Notes. This is one of the first that I invested in, there is a 4% buy in with no management fee and this one happened to close early after 2 years with a 32% return. I still have some Notes but the returns are not as good as they were, the glory days are gone, but they still return around 8% with a 60% barrier against market falls.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jsx22qkz1i...0Note.pdf?dl=0
I get that you dont like Deveres but in my experience they are no better or worse than any other Financial Advisor in the business - after all if these guys were any good they would have made their millions and would be retired to the Bahamas.