How Charles Stanley works with IFAs

By Rebecca Stein, Investment Manager, Oxford

At Charles Stanley, we understand how important it is that advisers have the time to look after the personal and professional relationship with their clients. Outsourcing to a Discretionary Fund Manager helps give advisers extra time to focus on those relationships. As a trusted partner, we take over the responsibility of looking after the clients’ investments, operating within the parameters agreed with the adviser.

As the investment manager, we are responsible for the investment decisions and discussing the ongoing investment strategy with the financial adviser. We don’t outsource this aspect to relationship managers, as it is important that the person responsible for your client’s investments is accountable. The portfolio moves and adapts, not only with the investment landscape, but also in line with the client’s changing goals and needs from the investment portfolio.

We regularly complete a full review of the portfolio, which is always bespoke to the individual client’s requirements. This can be a useful milestone to ensure that we are still on course to meet the client’s financial goals. The asset allocation is reviewed, and so is the performance of the underlying investments. Market commentary is also provided, providing useful insights on our thinking for the portfolio strategy going forward.

To ensure that financial advisers always have their clients’ investment details on hand, some prefer that we notify them after each trade. This ensures the financial adviser has all the information needed to keep clients up to date with changes to the portfolio – including clear reasoning behind the decision at that time, and why this is suitable for the client. Increasingly, we are finding that outsourcing this aspect to an investment manager makes sense as it frees up the adviser’s valuable time.

The regularity of communication is entirely down to the financial adviser and their client – we can be in touch as little or as often as necessary. Some advisers prefer that we communicate solely with them, and others prefer that we have some direct contact with the underlying client. Whatever the preference, the reporting is tailored to the financial adviser and underlying client. We can produce investment performance and commentary information prior to meetings with the underlying client, or we are more than happy to be involved and come along to the meeting to discuss the investment element.

Costs are important to financial advisers, investment managers and clients. By creating a portfolio of direct equity investments, alongside a selection of collective investments to help increase diversification and reduce risk in certain areas, we can help keep overall portfolio costs down. We try to negotiate the lowest OCF (ongoing charges figure) possible with the fund houses. High fund costs can have the potential to drag on the performance of the investments, and it is something that we keep under constant review.

We aim to build a long-lasting, trusting relationship with you and your clients. Providing support and advice when markets are volatile is a critical part of the service that we provide to financial advisers. Market volatility can be very unsettling and negative headlines in the media can cause clients a great deal of anxiety. In these scenarios, it can be very valuable to have the option to pick up the phone to an investment manager and get the insight of someone monitoring the markets 24/7.

By Paul Cann, Director of Private Clients, Exeter

Regular communication is a vital part of an effective partnership between an IFA and the Investment Manager they trust to manage their clients’ investments. IFAs will be fully briefed so they have an informed view of the Investment Manager’s strategy, which helps the IFA to ensure that investments are being managed in accordance with the mandate they have agreed with their client. It is also our duty to ensure the IFAs client understands how their portfolio is adapted to ever-changing market conditions.

IFAs can draw on the investment manager’s wealth of information and experience. We provide a quarterly investment report which includes a commentary on recent market conditions. Where IFAs hold review meetings with their clients in person (or these days by video call), investment managers can join these meetings to give personal insight into market views and the client’s specific portfolio.

The combination of the Covid-19 pandemic, the conflict in Ukraine, and more recently the high inflation environment, has seen heightened volatility in investment markets. The financial advisers we work with have understandably been looking to Charles Stanley’s Investment Managers to keep them informed of our assessment of market conditions, our strategies, and how we navigate them with respect to client portfolios, so that they can support their clients in these challenging times.

Alongside our regular quarterly investment and market reports, we can also provide ad hoc updates to financial advisers about key issues which have a bearing on markets as well as detailed commentaries on portfolios to help advisers answer all the potential questions a client may have. Additionally, we send our weekly email newsletter ‘Sunday Brunch’ which includes highlights of our research output each week as well as other articles of interest to the IFA community.

Meet the team

By Sean Osborne, Group Head of Sales

Charles Stanley has recently bolstered its Intermediary Sales Team (IST), to ensure we are well prepared to deal with the rapidly changing marketplace and continue to provide the level of service IFAs and their clients demand and deserve. Adam Benzimra has joined as National Sales, along with Richard Kelly as Head of Strategic Partnerships, and Laura Mathieson as our Telephone Business Development Manager. All join us from Brooks Macdonald.

As we continue to build out our proposition to advisers in the digital/hybrid age, we have identified key areas that we are looking to support– supporting new firms, as well as national and network advisory firms.

Adam will be working closely with a small number of Charles Stanley’s key accounts alongside managing our face-to-face team of intermediary sales managers. Laura will be focused on identifying prospect adviser firms we believe could benefit from our comprehensive range of services including our bespoke discretionary service, platform-based models portfolios and specialist products like AIM IHT. 

Richard will work to enhance existing and build new strategic relationships across the market to ensure IFAs are able to access Charles Stanley’s proposition on their preferred panels and platforms alongside aligning to their preferred risk rating systems providing seamless access for advisers and their clients.

Along with our newly bolstered team, and high-quality services and propositions – which has recently expanded to include a range of responsible models - Charles Stanley will continue to provide our intermediary partners with ongoing thought leadership pieces, white papers, webinars and practical support packages.

Visit www.charles-stanley.co.uk/insights/knowledge/book-of-stories-3-0, to download your free copy of our latest research, Book of Stories 3.0. Here you’ll find more information on why clients engage with financial advisers, how the conversation has shifted, and how advisers can adapt to facilitate new or challenging conversations and demands with clients.

The value of investments can fall as well as rise. Investors may get back less than invested.

Charles Stanley & Co. Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.