What happens to your clients afterwards
How the handover meetings, the client file, the acquiring firm and written commitments decide the service your clients receive after you retire.
How the handover meetings, the client file, the acquiring firm and written commitments decide the service your clients receive after you retire.
If you are approaching retirement, you may be most concerned about particular clients, such as an elderly widowed client you have advised for twenty years.
These are the things that decide whether a client is looked after well once you stop, in order of importance.
This matters most. A client who has met their next adviser with you in the room treats the change as a handover. A client who receives a letter treats it as something done to them and may wonder what else will change.
In a conventional sale the transaction completes first and the introductions follow, so the adviser the client trusted is often no longer the person making the introduction.
Twenty years of context, such as why the portfolio is shaped the way it is, which son is sensible with money, and what happened in 2008 that means this client will never hold that fund again, is valuable to the next adviser. That context only transfers if it is written in the file.
A complete file means the firm still knows the client after the adviser leaves.
What matters is how the acquiring firm will look after your clients. Ask any buyer, including us, these three questions:
Your firm may have households below the level at which a servicing model pays for itself. How a buyer plans to look after those clients shows how they will treat the rest.
Verbal assurances about continuity given during a negotiation are not binding. If continuity matters to you, put it in the documents alongside the price.
Under Securo the handover happens while you are still advising. Trainee advisers reconnect with the clients who have gone quiet and hand them back to you. Clients meet the adviser who will look after them next while you are in the room. The acquisition happens at the end, once the relationships have moved across in person, so the process takes longer than a conventional sale.
A long-established firm may have clients paying for an annual review they have not had. This is a Consumer Duty issue first and a valuation issue second.
Read it
Making sure somebody else at the firm has met each client takes about two years and raises what the firm is worth.
Read it
Who sets the floor, when it is set and what happens if you disagree. Three questions to ask of any such commitment, including ours.
Read itSteven Bates, Director of Advisory at Equity & General, takes the first call with every adviser. Ring him on 020 8396 0486 or send a short note about your firm.