Behind The Scenes When Giving Financial Advice

We have had initial discussions with you, have prepared a fee quote for you after initial discussions, you have accepted it and we are now moving forwards with your agreed advice service.

The main fact find questionnaire is just about the numbers, this is about your health, wealth, history, experience, views, very private discussions on goals, aspirations, objectives, sometimes we end up being social workers

The ESG questionnaire:  we must establish whether you have an interest or strong views on environmentally friendly, socially responsible and corporate governance investing.

Existing schemes: process signed authority letters and then send a 2 page A4 sheet with lots of in depth questions so that we know enough about your existing pensions and investments.

The Chase: My Rottweiler Staff

• providers rarely reply in full, they send standard responses, we chase again, we hold in call queues for an average 1 hour
• then provider staff are working from home and have no access to systems
• providers send messages through to departments that do take incoming calls and do not make outgoing calls
• providers then offer 1,2,3, month turnaround times
• providers then sometimes do not reply or again do not send information
• even with HMRC, we are still awaiting outstanding HMRC decisions going back to March this year, 5 months and a client is still waiting on how they can draw their pension and the tax implications
• even this morning, 1 firm is this refusing to give any information whatsoever to Keeley, one of our team, on a deceased client’s outstanding balance despite copy will and authority letter from executor.  They say they have closed the account and cannot access it.  We need to find out the balance so that we can complete inheritance tax returns and they have argued for 30mins, will not give us the information and then have put the telephone down.  Yet another complaint to make for request for a simple answer of zero balance or the deceased client is owed or owes a few pounds.

Finally, after weeks and sometimes many months, we get all the information that we need.  We are then able to complete our own research, advice, issue reports and implement the advice.

It then all starts again, with quotations from providers, tax submissions etc either paper based, online or telephone.  Many providers cannot do complex cases or quotes online, it may then take 2-3 weeks to get a quotation.

Finally application forms, tax forms or fund switches and transfers can proceed.  On many occasions, despite us double and treble checking, providers tell us to send the XYZ form and then when we do, they return it and say we want the ABC form and this, after we had already double/treble checked what forms or instructions were needed.

We suggest 1 in 3 applications or instructions are then not processed correctly by pension or investment providers.  We must still scrutinise every single one for errors and omissions given the error rate. 

Some pension or investment companies may be migrating systems or in the middle of takeovers and company A’s system does not merge well with company B’s.  In a recent case it took 4 months for us and a client to be able to access their pension on a system and many hours of the pension having to be manually recalculated by the pension provider with missed investment performance growth back dated and compensation paid.

Finally we can relax but still having to explain to our client why it has taken some time to deliver the advice.  There is so much wasted time and problems behind the scenes with providers that we try to protect you, our client from.

Many of you will have personally experienced being on hold for ‘hours on end’ only to get through to an overseas call centre with English as a second language and then they promise to action or make notes and nothing is done.  Whether that is power, utilities, banking groups or public services, we have all suffered from this.  You may have also been hold on the telephone for a long time and they simply cut you off as just happened to Joanne (wife and co-director) minutes ago.

Welcome to the ‘behind the scenes’ world of financial planning.