‘I set up on my own out of sheer frustration’

The escape velocity from earth is about 11.2 kilometres a second, the self-professed geek explains, and the speed he felt he was travelling at towards “a company I really wanted to work for, where I could look after clients properly”.

“Our work is also all about helping clients escape to the lifestyle they want, so it felt like a unifying theme between us and our clients,” he adds.

Moss has worked in the financial advice industry since 2001, including at small independent financial advisers, national IFAs, law firms and accountancies, but none of those made him happy due to a “consistent problem” he found in all companies over how they served their clients.

He says there was too much focus on new business and transactions, and not enough focus on delivering for clients the companies already had.

“I felt repeatedly [I was] just getting clients on board with the promise of this great thing and wanting to deliver it, but being restricted in my ability to deliver it by what was around me,” he explains.

“And I saw this play out in all these different types of businesses, the same sort of trends, and in the end I set up on my own out of sheer frustration.”

Quality over quantity

It was a similar story in job interviews at advice companies, even so-called new model firms, where the conversations quickly became "about the assets that I could bring with me”. So in the end he decided the risk of getting it wrong for his clients yet again was too high and he had to set up his own company.

Eleven.2 Financial Planning, founded in late 2019, is part of the Sense Network. Moss prides himself on his focus on quality over quantity. He has not set himself any growth targets and says he has taken all the “best bits” from the companies he has worked with instead.

“The first thing was no compromises. So the best larger firms that I've been at, if you look behind the scenes at what they're using, there's nothing that a small firm like me can't use if you don't cut corners,” he says.

I'm very clear at the outset that I just wanted to use all these components that were the best of breed in these areas and bring them together behind the scenes

“And, I was always very sure that I didn't want to cut corners, so I wanted to have the best investment solution that I've ever had at a firm that I worked for, which I have ... and the tech stack as well. 

“I wanted to make sure that we used the best platform technology that I'd used ... the very best cash flow modelling software ... So I'm very clear at the outset that I just wanted to use all these components that were the best of breed in these areas and bring them together behind the scenes.”

Moss currently looks after about 70 families, having started his business with half that number. He says his maximum capacity is 80 families.

The aim of the business was to replicate what the service feels like for clients of an "old high street IFA", with added modern-style rigour on the investment and tech sides.

Moss outsources most non-advice functions, and having worked at law firms and accountancies, he knows how to work in partnership with these professionals to give clients an all-round service.

"I hope that gives them the feel of having all of this stuff covered, if not in-house then through connections that we have, so that they don't have to source other advisers to help with other bits separately," he says.

The financial planning process and having a cash flow plan for clients – it’s very low value as a one-off piece of work

Eleven.2 offers different service levels, but most clients get two reviews a year — one periodic review and one extra catch-up meeting.

"In reality, I'll speak to most of my clients a lot more regularly than twice a year," Moss says. "And that's very much part of the proposition that I try and run, [which] is that if clients have a big financial decision to make it's unlikely to fit neatly into the sort of review process, and so I want them to feel comfortable coming to me and running it past me and getting my views.

"And we can use things like cash flow planning that we've got in the background for them to test the impact of different decisions, and most clients take me up on that."

Understanding fees

When it comes to fees, he keeps these flexible, offering fixed fees, asset-based fees and time-based fees depending on the needs of the client and the nature of the work involved.

"When we take on a new client, the first thing I explain is what each element of cost that you incur with an advised portfolio is, what it's designed to do, what the typical range is for that cost, and sort of benchmark that," Moss says.

"And they're all the way from nothing, go and source your own funds [and] not having an adviser, through to a fully advised portfolio where you've got platform costs, advice costs, underlying fund costs, investment management costs, potentially.

"It's really important in those first meetings that a client should understand what all those elements are, what they're there to do, and also to know what I think is a typical cost for those elements so that they can make an informed decision."

All costings are then kept on file and reviewed regularly to keep it fair for clients and to avoid cross-subsidy.

DIY financial planning

Eleven.2's average client size is £600,000 to £700,000, though it also serves those in the accumulation stage who do not yet have substantial assets.

Most of Moss's clients have come through client referrals. He has found services such as Unbiased less useful, saying people were often looking for one-off solutions, which did not fit his style of planning.

"The financial planning process and having a cash flow plan for clients — it's very low value as a one-off piece of work, because all the assumptions are going to be immediately wrong on like day two, and you're drifting away as soon as you started," he says.

This does not mean financial planning cannot be simple though, and perhaps even done without a professional planner, he adds. "This idea of everybody needs a really complicated Voyant cash flow plan with really granular information in it — I don't think it's true," he says.

"I think that actually puts people off the idea of planning. I was trying to make this point clearly to clients [that] financial planning isn't about having a really complicated plan in Voyant that we update a few times a year, sometimes it'll just be a question of using a spreadsheet to work out what's the sensible level of pension funding or, the other way around, based on how much you're funding your pension at the moment, what income is that likely to realise for you down the line? 

"People have very little concept of that. These are people who are putting quite a lot of money into their pension through work. They've got absolutely no concept of whether that's a small or a large amount, or what it's going to translate into," Moss continues.

"If I speak to a client initially and they're not for us or they don't want what we offer, they don't want the financial planning, I'll always stress that a lot of this stuff you can do it yourself if you're competent in Excel. There's online tools where you can do it — iPhones have a decent sort of slimmed down cash flow planning tool, which clients can use themselves.

"Quite often it will just be a case of I'll signpost how to use these things and you can use it and, if you're happy to go and pick the investments yourself, then you've probably got all the bits you need."

Yet, he regards it as a source of frustration that it's still so hard to deliver regulated advice to people who haven't built up the assets.

"I would love to be able to offer a wider service at a lower cost to clients, but it's just really hard. Things like guidance will hopefully help and I'm really interested in that area," he says.

"But at the moment, the way things are, the requirements to run a regulated file compliantly are quite heavy handed."

Moss says he would like to be able to offer full regulated advice to more people without the burden of compliance costs. The consumer duty has gone some way to addressing this, in that it has made suitability reports shorter by removing duplications, he says, adding: "More proportionality around what you need to do to get a regulated piece of work out would be good."

But he says replacement business is still problematic. He recalls a new case he did recently for a pension transfer and calls the number of documents he had to put on the file "monstrous".

"[It] ended up being over 100 documents or something that I'd uploaded to the client file, which is crazy, so the bureaucracy is still over the top," he says.

He notes that most clients would not read a key investor information document, and yet they are still part of the disclosure process.

"So I think the more extraneous sort of stuff you can strip out of the documentation side of things. That genuinely doesn't mean clients have less access to information — all of that stuff could make the whole advice process more streamlined," he says.

I think financial planning as a paid-for add-on at work could be a really good thing for employers to do

"But I think in the absence of that guidance you would hope will fill that gap for some clients, and I'm very up for trying to integrate a guidance process if I can."

In the meantime, Moss does pro bono work in schools and helps individuals with simple things such as understanding their pension for free.

He says: "I like doing it and it's enjoyable. It feels like a nice thing to do, just helping them understand their pension statements and that sort of thing. I'd like to think that a lot of advisers do that."

He adds that helping school-leavers deal with their student debt and holding surgeries in workplaces are some of the areas where advisers can have the most impact outside of their day-to-day jobs.

"I'd like to see a lot more employers bring that service in and pay for it as a benefit for their employees, the way they bring in wellbeing people — sort of counsellors and things like that," he says.

"I think financial planning as a paid-for add-on at work could be a really good thing for employers to do."

carmen.reichman@ft.com