How we work
Our First Meeting
Finding out about us
- This meeting is held at our expense, it is important that you are comfortable with what we do and how we do it before commencing a professional relationship.
- We’ll introduce ourselves and provide you with a business card confirming your adviser’s contact details.
- We’ll discuss our services and give you a copy of our “what we do and how we do it” and “terms and conditions” document outlining our services and how we intend to work with you.
- We’ll also discuss the charges for our services.
- All actual charges and fees (in pounds and pence) will be agreed with you before we do any work and we’ll explain your payment options too. We’ll also let you know where any fees are subject to VAT.
Finding out about you
- The main purpose of our first meeting is to find out about your financial circumstances and objectives.
- One of the most valuable things we can do for you is to draw out a clearer vision of your financial future. We can help you understand what options you have around longer-term issues, such as retirement. If you have an obvious and immediate need, we can also help you to meet this.
- Once your financial needs are clear, the next step is to be clear on your priorities; your adviser can use their expertise to help you establish your goals and develop a plan of action that suits your personal situation.
- Where we are providing advice on investments, one of the key areas we will explore is establishing how much risk you are prepared and able to take with your money. Understanding what risk really means to you is critical to the investment decisions you make.
It would be helpful if you could bring along to this meeting, details of any policies, schemes, investments, mortgages, financial outgoings, wills, interests in trusts that you already have.
Analysing your requirements
- Where necessary, we’ll forward your authorities to obtain additional information from the relevant product providers. We may also need to contact you for further information and ask your permission to liaise with your other professional advisers (e.g. accountant, solicitor).
- Once we have all the necessary information in place, we’ll undertake our research to assist us in identifying appropriate plans and solutions which will help you to achieve your objectives. As part of identifying appropriate solutions, we take into account areas such as:
- Your attitude to and understanding of the risks involved
- Timescales relevant to your objectives
- Appropriateness of products and investments, including types of fund, where these are invested and how these fit with products or investments you may already hold
- Tax-efficient investments and planning – we’ll try, wherever possible, to consider tax-efficient opportunities and, in this respect, we may need to liaise with your tax advisers (please note that the Financial Conduct Authority does not regulate tax advice).
- Costs and charges
- One of the most visual ways to help you plan for your financial future is by using cash flow modelling technology. Using our cash flow analysis system, we will input information about the current value of your investments and apply relevant assumptions about things like investment growth rates and key life events to create detailed and precise cash flow models based on your individual circumstances.
- We’ll set out our recommendations in a financial planning report.
Our Second Meeting
- Depending on what we agree, we’ll send you our report to review or we’ll arrange to meet again and discuss it.
- Depending on your circumstances, you may want to invite other parties to this meeting such as your spouse, your children or other professional advisers.
- Our report will outline your current position and detail our professional observations and recommendations.
- In developing our recommendations, we’ll always look to agree a solution for you that strikes the right balance between your financial needs and objectives, and the amount of risk you are prepared and able to take in achieving them. Sometimes that means you’ll need to compromise, and your adviser will be able to identify where that is the case and build it in to your plan.
- The report will also contain the supporting information behind our recommendation, including where applicable, illustrations and brochures for any financial products recommended.
- The costs associated with our recommendation(s) will also be confirmed in our report. If further meetings are required these will be discussed and agreed.
Implementation
If our recommendations involve putting in place any financial products, once we have received your instructions, we’ll forward the completed application forms and payments on your behalf.
Ongoing support
We’ll agree with you at this stage whether we’ll provide any ongoing services, what those services will include and the cost of those services.
We appreciate that sometimes you may just be looking for help in a particular area on a one-off or ad hoc basis, and that’s fine. However, our optional ongoing services are designed to ensure that your financial arrangements stay on track to meet your financial goals.