IFA - Asking for too much information?

cfw1994

Danish74 said:

Thanks everyone! Appreciate the help here. They are asking for carte blanche to look into any aspect of my financials with my pension providers. And I think I might go back and ask them to limit the scope to just pensions

This has been invaluable

Are they FA, or IFA?
I’d start by ascertaining that for a fact!!

Albermarle

HappyHarry said:

If you are asking an IFA to give you advice, then the IFA will want to know a lot about your current circumstances and future plans, else they cannot give you the best advice.

The impression given on other threads, is that the normal way is that you have a free one hour chat with the IFA. A kind of get to know you session where some basic details of your finances and objectives are discussed + charges if you go ahead.

Then you decide whether to go ahead or not . If you go ahead then the IFA starts collecting detailed info about your pensions, savings as part of the process of giving personalised advice.

In this case the IFA/FA is wanting full access to pension details before the OP has agreed to go ahead, or signed any contract . Is that normal ?

Grumpy_chap

Danish74 said:

Hi everyone, I went to unbiased.co.uk a free service that directs you to IFAs

A company called Humboldt Financial called me and after about an hour's chat where we shared things like

Outstanding Mortgage
Savings
Expenses
Plans for Retirement

At the end he asks me to scan and sign some forms back to him giving the company (Humboldt) my consent to write to our pension providers over the years to get an up to date valuation as well as enquire about any aspect of other products I might have with them

It all seems like handing over a lot of information without a contract (yet) and i wondered whether this perfectly ok or should I tread carefully?

Value the thoughts of this group! Thanks in advance.

Danish 74

I changed IFA during the course of 2021 and the type of questions that the OP has been asked do not seem to be particularly unusual. 

Having said that, I did not give consent to any potential IFA to go and make these enquiries.  Instead I prepared a table of the "current valuation" of pension funds that I had based upon the latest statements (mostly end March, some end December) and shared that as near-enough to give an order-of-magnitude idea of the value.  There is also one fund I have which has some guarantees, so I simply mentioned that fund had a minimum return guarantee.

That approach seemed to be sufficient for potential-IFAs to make initial comment and meant they could comment more quickly and with less effort on their part.

dunstonh

Thanks everyone! Appreciate the help here. They are asking for carte blanche to look into any aspect of my financials with my pension providers. And I think I might go back and ask them to limit the scope to just pensions

That is a normal request as the provider will be asked a range of questions about the pension. Things you would not think of.   

However, I am confused by what you are saying about "look into any aspect of my financials with my pension providers" and "I might go back and ask them to limit the scope to just pensions".     Those two things are the same.  So, how can you limit it?

In this case the IFA/FA is wanting full access to pension details before the OP has agreed to go ahead, or signed any contract . Is that normal ?

Yes it is normal.  Most firms will extend the free period to cover initial information gathering from providers.    

An agency transfer is the preferred option as most providers will integrate the data into the IFAs systems electronically. That is a massive timesaver and cost reducer and avoids errors where trying to match up funds for example (can be awkward manually where you have a provider with 15 different series funds and loads of legacy companies).   Whereas without an agency transfer, it is supplied manually and requires staffing to key the information into the IFA systems.     If it is a workplace pension, it doesn't matter anyway as agency arrangements don't work with those and it's manual.

Having said that, I did not give consent to any potential IFA to go and make these enquiries.  Instead I prepared a table of the "current valuation" of pension funds that I had based upon the latest statements (mostly end March, some end December) and shared that as near-enough to give an order-of-magnitude idea of the value.  There is also one fund I have which has some guarantees, so I simply mentioned that fund had a minimum return guarantee.

I suspect for most IFA firms, that would not be acceptable from a compliance point of view.    Obtaining data from providers serves two purposes.   1) the information is used to form the advice and 2) the audit trail confirming the information is correct.  It may be sufficient for a quick and dirty chat but not fo the provision of advice.

There is also the issue that if an individual is being fussy about supplying information then do they have something to hide.  It can also be an indicator of a difficult individual that is going to be more hassle than it is worth.   If the adviser cannot trust the client then some advisers will walk away as they don't want that sort of person.

BritishInvestor

Albermarle said:

HappyHarry said:

If you are asking an IFA to give you advice, then the IFA will want to know a lot about your current circumstances and future plans, else they cannot give you the best advice.

The impression given on other threads, is that the normal way is that you have a free one hour chat with the IFA. A kind of get to know you session where some basic details of your finances and objectives are discussed + charges if you go ahead.

Then you decide whether to go ahead or not . If you go ahead then the IFA starts collecting detailed info about your pensions, savings as part of the process of giving personalised advice.

In this case the IFA/FA is wanting full access to pension details before the OP has agreed to go ahead, or signed any contract . Is that normal ?

For someone with a "traditional" focus on products, maybe. But I would see this more as part of the fact-finding process after the client has agreed to proceed (effectively stage 2, where stage 1 is the Discovery meeting which you have described).