The old saying is that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Certainly in the financial services intermediary sector there has historically been a bit of a myth that financial advice was somehow for free.
This is probably due to the fact that most financial advice was paid for by commission payable when the consumer purchased a financial product.
But this has also been a bit confusing for the consumer because commission comes from product charges and some less than scrupulous advisers have suggested that commission is a no cost to the consumer option.
This is not the case, the consumer always pays.
At Informed Choice we have an approach that enables our clients to decide exactly what service they require from us. We call it EAIR and it stands for engagement, advice, implementation and review.
We designed this approach because there are a number of things about which we are passionate.
First of all we are passionate about the delivery of wholly impartial independent professional financial planning and advice.
What we don’t set out to do is to flog financial products to anyone simply so that we can maximise our earnings.
We are also absolutely passionate about transparency. It seems to us that our clients deserve the right to know everything they need to know about the services that they are buying. For example if they need to buy a financial product solution it seems right to us that they know all about the risk that they are taking by investing their money.
Rather than focusing just upon possible returns we believe they need to be fully aware of any possible downside.
We also think it is important to be transparent about costs whether that is the amount you are pay for the product we recommend or the cost to you of the advice and services that we provide to you.
We only ever recommend products that we fully understand and that are capable of being explained to our clients quickly and in a way which is understandable. What right do we have to recommend products that we don’t fully understand?
If there is a risk involved and there often is with investment and retirement products it seems wholly appropriate to us that the client knows full well what those risks are.
We avoid any product that has an opaque nature.
There are after plenty of such products around and on more than one occasion many people have suffered financial loss by buying them and often whilst thinking that their money was working hard for them and was safe.
We also believe that clients should know exactly how much they are paying in product charges. In addition they should know exactly what they are paying to their financial adviser. Only by knowing the price they are paying can clients judge whether they are truly getting value for money.
So a transparent relationship is vitally important to the way we do business.
But it starts right at the beginning of our client relationship.
When we engage with our clients we want them to be able to decide if we are the right advisers for them. We also want to establish early on if we can add value to their financial lives.
We offer a first meeting with prospective clients that is at no cost to them and certainly without obligation.
We ask only one thing and that is prior to the meeting that they complete our financial questionnaire gathering together all the details about their existing financial arrangements their income and expenditure, assets and liabilities.
In this new video, Informed Choice executive director Nick Bamford describes how we charge for our services and talks about our four stage process of engagement, advice, implementation and review.
