Independent Advice & Your Protection

The benefits & importance of independent financial advice

The big advantage of taking independent financial advice is that you will have access to all the products in the market through a qualified practitioner. Taking independent financial advice will provide you with access, through a qualified professional, to all of the investment, pension and insurance options currently available. Restricted advisers can only advise on the products of those they choose to tie themselves to. By definition, this restricts your choice to those that have a commercial influence over them.

As Independent and Chartered Financial Planners we offer unbiased and unrestricted independent financial advice, recommending the most suitable solutions and products having researching the whole market.

So it’s a very simple choice for you to make…

Let us put ourselves in your shoes; use what we learn about you and your family, combine it with our extensive knowledge, expertise and experience to ensure you receive the best advice possible. The result will be advice that is free from any constraints, in its most pure and unbiased form.

What protection do you have?  FOS & the FSCS

We will always endeavour to ensure the products recommended are suitable for you. When advising you on regulated products (including investments, insurance and some forms of mortgages) you have the protection of the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS).

If you are unhappy about the advice or service you have received from any financial adviser you should firstly contact the firm that provided the advice or service. This gives them the chance to put things right and/or to provide their own version of events. Should you remain dissatisfied you may be entitled to refer your complaint to the FOS who will investigate the complaint independently and make a ruling.

The FOS work with customers and financial advisers to resolve a complaint, and when they do have to make a ruling it is binding upon the firm. Full details of how to contact the FOS together with information about how to complain are available from their website – www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk or by telephoning 0800 023 4 567.

If you try to submit a complaint to a firm and the firm is dissolved, or unable to meet its obligations, you may have recourse to the FSCS – www.fscs.org.uk. This service is funded by levies on firms that are authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to protect customers where firms have closed or gone into liquidation – www.fca.org.uk/register

Some financial advisers do give advice on products that are not regulated by FCA – such as general taxation and some Buy-to-Let mortgages. We would always explain this to you should we provide advice on an unregulated product. It is very important that you are happy with such advice as you may not have the added protection of the FOS or FSCS when dealing with some unregulated products.