Portal Financial Services

CathA

Out of the blue my hubby has had a letter from the above, offering a free pension review. They say they are registered with the FCA, but I thought that companies weren't allowed to cold call (admittedly in letter form). Thoughts please?

By the way, we're not going to send them any details, just wondered if they are allowed to do this. Thanks.

brewerdave

If you search back, there have been previous threads re Portal Financial.

CathA

{Removed by Forum team}

Thank you, that's what I thought. They wanted details of his pensions, DOB, NI number, address etc. Needless to say they won't be getting any of that. They also said that if you look on unbiased.co they are on there. Do you think I should report them? They also give an FCA registered number as well.

PensionTech

Just in case you haven't seen this thread already:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5152905

CathA

I did try searching for Portal Finance but nothing came up. Thanks for that.

stubtoe

I think you should check your facts before making such statements dunstonh.

This firm actually do offer full pension reviews and advice for 'free'. The catch, if you can call it a catch, is that they only charge their clients a fee if they proceed with their recommendations i.e. implement their advice to transfer your pension elsewhere. So, in theory you could receive free advice and then implement their recommendations yourself (assuming you could access the pension they were recommending as a direct customer).

Whilst you could question their business model in that they are giving away all their IP for free and also are on the can for the advice they've provided, the fact is that this model must work for them.

There are a number of firms who operate similar models, Profile FS being another that springs to mind.

And just to be clear I am not involved in anyway with Portal or Profile.

kangoora

The problem being, this is exactly how scam companies catch their mugs. Far safer to assume every cold caller is a scammer than, as an unsophisticated investor, take a chance that you are dealing with an ethical, regulated firm who happens to use cold calling.

stubtoe

@ kangoora: I don't completely disagree, but better for those customers who end up speaking to a regulated company rather than unregulated scamsters? Theres no way to stop cold calling happening (from unregulated firms), only educating people how to deal with.

@ dunstonh: Time will tell whether it is a flawed business model but I do tend to agree with you on the morals/ethics of the business. That said, I would much prefer potential customers to be using a regulated adviser with all the protections that affords rather than some scamster.

I have to say the number of consumers that have been contacted by and/or already transacted is frightening and I believe far worse a problem than the powers that be will admit...

Portal_Financial

To CathA: We are sorry to hear that you have received an unwanted mailing from us. We will of course remove your details and make sure we do not mail to you in the future if that is what you would like. Please can you contact us directly on 0845 555 0300 or email [EMAIL="info@portalfinancial.co.uk"]info@portalfinancial.co.uk[/EMAIL] confirming your full name and address and we will look to remove you from our mail database.

To clarify some statements made here, we are FCA regulated and can be found by anyone on the FCA register. We are also active in raising awareness of scams and have appeared in numerous media outlets including the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33804578

To dunstonh: I hope you don’t mind my replying directly to your points, and the following is a reprint of our response to you earlier this year:

“There is no such thing as a free pension review” – As described earlier in this thread, this is our business model and it is exactly that. To give you an example, if you go through the whole process of us gathering all your pension information, our conducting a thorough factfind with you, our reviewing everything and then our providing written recommendations and advice, complete with details of the charges involved should you wish to take that advice, and you choose not to follow it – then there is absolutely no charge. That is a free pension review. Likewise, if we recommend you stay where you are, there is no charge. There are charges for setting up and transferring pensions, ongoing management etc. and they are all detailed as part of the free review once we know what our recommendation is.

Whilst I am all for preaching caution if anyone is feeling pressurised into doing something, or believes they don’t understand what is being offered (or worse scammed) I also feel that it is no-one’s interests to spread disinformation about a business based on assumptions.

Portal Financial

Ian011

Portal_Financial wrote: »

Please can you contact us directly on 0845 555 0300 or ...

Beware that the quoted 0845 number is premium rate and the required declaration of the applicable Service Charge is missing.

All 084, 087 and 09 numbers are premium rate. The premium is the additional Service Charge paid to the benefit of the called party and their telecoms provider.

In addition to the Service Charge, callers pay an Access Charge of up to 12p per minute from landlines or up to 45p per minute from mobiles.

Ofcom regulations effective 1 July 2015 require the Service Charge to be declared "in close proximity to the number everywhere that it is advertised or promoted".

New FCA regulations effective 26 October 2015 ban the use of these types of numbers for contact by existing customers. When used for sales lines their usage is a well-known 'sales prevention technique'.

Portal_Financial

[FONT=&quot]To Dunstonh:[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]No problem. MSE have now made it easier for us to engage by allowing us our own account rather than having to run everything via the moderators.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Yes, we state in our reviews who the alternative provider should be and how it should be invested. It is a full review complete with advice. [/FONT][FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]In principle there is nothing stopping a client following the advice they haven’t paid for, buying the product direct and then complaining to us later about the advice – this is one of the business risks we are prepared to take on. We are lucky that the majority of our clients who reach the advice stage then go on to engage us to act on it. We put a huge emphasis on service at our end to ensure that there is plenty of goodwill to go with the good advice! [/FONT][FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]In practice it won’t always be that easy for a client to go direct and get exactly the same deal as we can get for them as we can often negotiate additional discounts for our clients on the provider’s AMC’s due to the amount of in-house processing we manage for them and the volumes we do.[/FONT][FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Whilst there are certain commercialities involved that we wouldn’t want to go into detail on with our competitors ( such as yourself [/FONT][FONT=&quot] ) we are more than happy for you to come and visit us to see our operation and how the business works in practice.[/FONT]


[FONT=&quot]To Ian011:[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Thank you for highlighting that to us. I will double check the situation with the clients’ own provider “access charges” as this is not something we were aware of. If we need to change to an 033 or 0800 or local number then we will do so.[/FONT][FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]I can confirm that we don’t put any “service charge” on the 0845 numbers (or any of our numbers) and were under the impression this was local rate for everyone.[/FONT][FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]The last thing we want to do is put anyone off contacting us, or to cause any unnecessary phone charges to people – and we offer to phone the client back as a matter of course in case they are worried about their phone bill (even if they have called on our 01634 number).[/FONT]