If you have an investment portfolio of £500,000 (or less), who would you expect to be your point of contact in the firm looking after your money?
Barclays Wealth has announced that customers in its Private Clients division will have an ‘unregulated individual’ appointed as their main point of contact.
What does this mean?
An unregulated individual will not be able to provide any advice.
So any questions that you have that sound like “What should I do?”, “What is the best course of action for me?”, Should I make any further investments?”, Should I disinvest any of my portfolio?” or “What do you think about investing in XYZ?” will not be answered by your point of contact.
They will instead have to refer your questions to an authorised individual.
We suspect that as it becomes more expensive for institutions to deliver meaningful advice to their clients they will seek to change the way they interact with consumers, either as Barclays Wealth have done or by greater use of contact via technology, or by increasing their fees to cover those costs.
It seems to us that an investor who wants a personal relationship with their adviser, someone who can answer the kind of questions detailed above, will be better served by finding themselves a local qualified and experienced IFA to advise them on their investments.
Small definitely is good when it comes to managing investment portfolios.
