I am writing this a week or so before my father has an operation to hopefully save his sight.
He has a complicated condition as well as having glaucoma. He is virtually blind in his left eye, and the op is a new cutting edge procedure at Moorfields to try to halt the decline in his remaining eye.
It really made me think how we take our senses for granted. Yesterday I parked the car in the drive and tried an experiment. Keeping my eyes tight shut, I tried to make my way into our kitchen.
Well, I made it, but not before I knocked the milk bottles over, tried to answer a ringing phone and nearly trod on the cat! Not easy.
Best of luck Dad.
Also on the subject of ‘seeing the future clearly’, the Financial Services Authority have now published the (almost) final version of the Retail Distribution Review.
This review is designed to improve the way financial advisers do their job through being more qualified, and to change the way they are remunerated from commissions to fees.
To quote from the FSA site:
Our proposals involve:
• improving the clarity with which firms describe their services to consumers;
• addressing the potential for adviser remuneration to distort consumer outcomes; and
• increasing the professional standards of advisers.
Its primary focus is to improve public confidence in the life and pensions industry – providers and advisers alike.
We are all for that!
We will visit this again in future, but for now it is music to our ears, and here are a few of the highlights:
-
make the distinction between truly independent advice and restricted advice (the latter is offered by many banks)
-
raise the bar on qualifications and ongoing CPD
-
charge fees rather than commissions and be transparent with the adviser charge and product charge specified separately
-
make clear the service provided on an ongoing basis and how this is charged for
-
introduce a new code of ethics stating that the adviser will act at all times with integrity
We would like to think that for those of you who deal with us already, the above will come as no surprise. This is the way we have worked for years.
We work for you in an impartial way, concentrating on helping you achieve your goals in life. Simple really.
The report is to be found on the FSA website, and if you feel brave (it’s long) you can read it. The bit that keeps depressing us however, is the constant reference to ‘sales’.
What sales? There should not be any! Surely you’d prefer to deal with an adviser, rather than a salesperson?
A final vital point here is that we can see the salespeople out there simply saying if you buy something from them, that the fee is this, rather than the commission is this. This happens at present when you are sold a product with some advisers, they ask ‘would you like to pay a fee rather than us receiving commission?’
This totally misses the point about real Financial Planning! It is not about product, but measuring where you are now in relation to your goals in life, and devising a strategy to get you there with the minimum risk. Crucially, we need to invest in sophisticated technology to be able to deliver such a service to our clients – so we do!
Diagnosis before prescription! You may need to stop investing for all we know.
Make no mistake, if an adviser does not provide you with a detailed written strategy report before ever talking about products, and does not ask you to get your cheque book out to pay for it, then you are dealing with a salesperson – not a planner.
About Graeme Urwin
