HFM COLUMBUS was recently approached by Financial Adviser with an invitation to submit our financial performance information. The aim was to determine whether our revenue/fees income would warrant our inclusion in your ‘Top 100 Financial Adviser Survey’.
The survey is, I believe, carried out in conjunction with ‘data owner and business intelligence agency’ Matrix Solutions.
While happy to be included in the survey, I am concerned that the narrow band of criteria required for inclusion within this assessment of ‘top’ financial advisers is restrictive and, given how the industry has progressed in recent years, ultimately even archaic.
Many wealth managers/financial advisers would struggle in 2015 if they did not diversify their range of expertise/offering to clients in my view. To be restricted to pure investment advice (as a “Top Financial Adviser”) in today’s world is to stagnate, and certainly does not accord with the provision of the holistic services that a true financial advisor should provide.
While revenue earned from our management of client portfolios is, of course, a vital part of our business, the survey appears to take no account of the significant revenues we earn from a wide range of value added activity – from financial planning fees to employee benefit services, mortgage broking, the production of tax returns, to name but a few.
We also arrange a considerable amount of disability, life and critical illness business on a group and an individual basis, essential services of a “Top Financial Adviser”, I would submit.
Moreover, even as regards assets under management, your data premise also appears to exclude the likes of subscriptions to VCTs, EISs, structured products, property and other specialist investment products – all of which translate into solid revenue for our business and an appropriate element of the portfolios of many high net-worth clients.
So, ultimately, it seems the survey really only relates to gross sales of certain categories of investment funds by value, and does not cover the wider world of work, almost all fee-based, which financial advisers engage in and which doesn’t result in the sale of investment funds or gathering of assets.
I also gather fund switches count towards ‘sales’. I thought the days of rewards for ‘churning’ were long gone.
We are in 2015, in a world where we believe consumers need holistic advice across the entire spectrum of their financial advice, not simply a narrowly defined ‘investment’ criteria.
Is this not, after all, what wealth management is all about? Surely it is time for this survey to move to another metric such as a fee-based ranking and away from a flawed AUM model?
Jeremy Hoyland
Chief executive,
HFM Columbus,
London
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