How We Work

Click here to download this page as a leaflet.

We offer individual, tailored advice depending on the circumstances of each client. We are highly qualified and offer a professional service.

We try to offer service according to the needs of our clients. This means that you should get the level of service you require, suitable to your budget.

This document works in conjunction with our other leaflets to show you the services you can select, and how we will charge for our advice.

Step 1 – Initial discussion
Our initial discussion is free of charge and without obligation. This allows us to discuss your objectives, requirements for advice and service.

Step 2 – Choose your level of ongoing service
Please see the accompanying leaflets for more details on these services.

The above retainers are based on a minimum contract of 1 year.

These services do not include the charges to you for administration, research and advice, which are dealt with below.

Step 3 – Advice and recommendations
We will need to go through a number of steps to ensure that we provide you with a professional service.

This will include:

• Factfind
  We will need to gather data on your personal and financial situation.
• Technical Research
  We will spend time analysing your circumstances to come up with recommendations based on your priorities and needs.
• Product Research
  We use highly complex data analysis tools to enable us to advise you on the best solutions to your needs, and present this to you in a straightforward manner.
  This includes tools to:
  o Compare the product features of every financial product on the market
  o Search the entire mortgage market for the best deal
  o Compare the costs of plans
  o Get comparative data on all of the thousands of available investment funds
• Preparation of reports
  Where appropriate we will report back to you in a concise manner. We will always prepare you a report confirming the suitability of our advice.
• Administration
  We will help the smooth running of your plans so that you do not have to do this. Also, we will administer the set up of new plans.

Charges for advice
We believe that to offer a truly impartial service we should be paid on the advice we give rather than the products we sell. After all, would you trust a plumber who was paid only if he replaced your boiler? Of course not, since this would inevitably mean that he would be under pressure to sell you a new (and possibly expensive) boiler every time he saw you – even if this was not in your best interests. As far as we are concerned, it should be the same with financial planning.

We offer fixed charges for our work, so you know exactly where you stand.

Usually commission can be taken to offset our charges (see below). Often this means that clients will not have to make any up-front payment for advice.

We will agree with you up-front a schedule of expected charges so that you are aware how much time we expect to work on your behalf. If we are likely to over-reach this agreed figure, we will let you know. This approach means that you pay for exactly what advice you are given, and never any more than is necessary.

Commission Offset?
Click here for more information about how commission offset works in practice.

Most clients choose to offset our charges with commission from contracts that we recommend to them. Usually this means that you will not have to pay us any charges for our services, since we can structure the contracts that we recommend to pay for the likely charges.

If not enough commission is received to offset the balance you will receive a bill for the balance; however, if there is more commission received, we will keep this on account for use against future services.

As an alternative you may choose to pay our charges in full and we will take no commission from contracts. This will mean that the charges will be lower for you.

Click here for a leaflet on this option.

Please contact us for more information on how we work.