Paraplanner role

Savingsmarter

Hi all,

An Independent Financial Adviser friend of mine has kindly offered to help me with a possible Paraplanner role as she sees me as a good fit. We are UK based.
I am coming from a very different career to Paraplanning, without any qualifications yet, though I do help people with basic financial research and supportive resources.
I have taken an active interest in my own investments and I’m motivated to now help others who are coming from debt towards financial independence.
My friend has invited me to her office in a couple of weeks to meet the rest of her team of fellow IFAs.
I am unfamiliar with much of the jargon and the types of analytic software that gets referenced quite a lot.
Would anyone with Paraplanning experience be willing to chat or to share for a while to give me some perspective on what the role means to them and how they have found it?
Any tips or advice would be most welcome too.
Thank you good people!

middleclassbutpoor

Hi

Not a paraplanner but hold qualifications of an IFA (not an IFA though).

I have seen the PP role work differently in different organisations.

In simple terms, the IFA meets the customer and does an initial consultation with them which will include capturing and recording a number of hard and soft facts about their customer and what their objectives are.

Following the meeting they will write up additional notes about what they want to review and do and what the IFA believes the direction of advice should be.

The PP picks up the outputs from this meeting and will pull everything together so that could be inputting the customer details onto a back office system and then doing research and doing various financial calculations such as CGT/Chargeable Gains etc.

If you had the qualifications, you may end up helping put the advice together and preparing the financial report which explains the advice. Very simply you end up giving the IFA the file back when it's ready to present the advice.

You can get specific Paraplanning qualifications but you would probably be expected to study if you don't have any qualifications.

The role is quite a technical role and I tend to find that if you like researching and analysing figures and doing the admin type tasks then the PP role is a very rewarding role.

If you are going in without qualifications, I would assume you are going in as a trainee so the expectations on you may be at the outset doing more of an administrator role which increases with scope as you become more qualified.