Some years ago, we along with thousands of other firms underwent a ‘Treating Customers Fairly’ assessment with the regulator. For us it involved a trip to a hotel west of Leeds where we had a sit-down with an examiner from our regulator, then the FSA, who asked series of very searching questions over something around a two-hour period. Before the meeting we had to supply all our business documents for them to look through – our standard Terms of Business Document, Initial Disclosure Document confirming our status as Independent Financial Advisors and all our Client & Fee Agreement Documents. The comment we got back at the end of our assessment was that ours was “the clearest suite of documents [he had] ever seen.”
That was nice, because that was what we intended them to be. Unlike firms who have one massive multi-page Client & Fee Agreement Document covering everything they do, we decided early on to have separate, individual, shorter, clearer, and more understandable separate documents for each service. From day one we’ve always done our best to make financial matters understandable. Our trademarked Clear and FAIR client proposition and our FairFees Promise have been designed to be both totally transparent and easy to understand. Once we are in a position to assess what work is required, we spell out in the clearest terms how we work, what we do and, what we shall charge. Likewise, when it comes to aspects of the advice like the giving of risk warnings, we give more explicit and detailed warnings than any firm we know. Just check out our Risk Realities pamphlet
