Advice Process
Our financial advice process consists of four stages, designed to ensure that our clients receive suitable advice and an outstanding level of service.
1 – Engagement
We have an initial conversation or exchange of emails to establish your requirements. At this stage we will send you our new client welcome pack and arrange a convenient time for an initial meeting.
Our welcome pack contains a simple confidential financial questionnaire for you to complete ahead of our meeting which means we can spend our time together discussing your goals and objectives, rather than gathering factual information.
The first meeting is at our expense (so without charge) and without any obligation. It will typically last 45-90 minutes and is a good opportunity for us to ask you lots of questions about your objectives and for you to ask us lots of questions about our qualifications, experience, fees and services.
Immediately following this first meeting we will write to you with an engagement letter. This sets out our understanding of your financial objectives, the services we have agreed to provide and the cost of these services. You will not incur any fees until you have signed and returned a copy of this engagement letter.
2 – Advice
On receipt of your signed engagement letter, we typically start the process of gathering detailed information about your existing financial arrangements including pension benefits and investment plans. We might also ask you for some additional detailed information about your personal finances and objectives.
It can take a few weeks to collate all of this information and we will keep you informed of progress during this time. Once this information has arrived from the different sources, we hold an internal ‘case conference’ to discuss the direction and construction of your report. We complete our analysis and research before writing your report, and this report is sent to you ahead of a second meeting.
At our second meeting we use the report as an agenda, discuss all of your options and present our recommendations for action. We encourage our clients to ask us lots of questions at this meeting. During this meeting we agree on a suitable course of action and confirm this in writing immediately after the meeting.
3 – Implementation
We take responsibility for completing any paperwork required for the implementation of the agreed course of action. This is then presented to you for your signature and processed by our administration team. We monitor the provider or investment manager to ensure the speedy completion of your applications. On receipt of policy documents, we check these for accuracy and then forward them to you for safe keeping.
4 – Review
Where relevant, we offer an ongoing review service to our clients. Depending on your level of assets under management, we will provide as a minimum a formal meeting once a year supported by a comprehensive annual review report. This review meeting is an opportunity to monitor progress towards your financial objectives, reassess your attitude towards investment risk and rebalance the asset allocation of your investments.
We also provide a quarterly valuation of all of your pension and investment assets which is sent to you along with our client newsletter.
You can contact your Financial Planner and the support team at any time during the year to discuss any questions you might have, request updated valuations or discuss any aspect of your financial planning.
