Standard Life has apologised over the misleading marketing material it sent to customers of its Sterling Pension fund last year. 

The Edinburgh-based life assurer said it had learned some important lessons from the costly mistake, which resulted in a sizeable £2.4m fine from the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

Paul Keeble, senior media affairs manager at Standard Life, said the company’s internal review originally identified problems with some of the literature in February of last year which triggered the first apology to customers.

He added, ‘We injected over £100 million into the fund to compensate them for their losses from the sudden fall in unit price.

‘Since then, we have conducted a full and thorough review of existing literature and put in place a new improved process for new literature. We have worked closely with the FSA throughout and co-operated fully with their investigation.’

It is understood that there were around 98,000 customers invested in the fund as at 23 December 2008, with many unaware of the true nature of the investments held by the fund.

The regulator found that the assurer had been marketing the fund as wholly invested in cash, despite the majority investment being in floating rate notes.