Investment experience
seanhurst
Member
Mornign all,
I am updating our reason why's to include a section on investment experience. I am trying to find some agreed wordings for each investor type and whilst i have no problem with sophisticated i am struggling with the rest, does anyone have a list?
Comments
To be honest, this is not really templated, I look at what they have, the responses to that part of the risk Q and end up with something like this:
You have held invested pensions over many years so you have experienced ups and downs in the markets. You have indicated you have some understanding of well known financial products. You don’t follow financial markets closely but you appreciate some high level information on how your money is invested.
Or like this:
You have held a workplace pension for several years and you have seen its value go up and down on your annual statements. You have remained in the default investment strategy and have never looked at your alternative options. You have also taken advantage of staff Share schemes and had an endowment in the past. You feel comfortable making these decisions, though you prefer to take financial advice in the areas you are less familiar with.
This detail won't necessarily be in the KYC but I find a prompt like this gets info out of advisers. IME they prefer overwriting to a blank space, I do too!
I mainly bespoke the wording on investment experience. It can be useful to include a checklist in the rpq for the client to fill in. I have a couple of advisers use this.
Asking if they've ever invested in the listed products (yes/no). Advised or on their own?
What they invested in (shares, funds, type of fund) and was this self selected or "best buy" list?
Do they use tax wrappers in their own planning because they understand the benefits of them (isa and pensions mainly)?
Have they ever been invested during a market downturn (credit crunch, dot com) and how did they react?
You can go on, but the end result is a great idea of what the client K&E is. You might even be able to build some broadly templated inserts based on the answers.
"You have held a workplace pension for several years "
I'm not taking a pop but ENGAGEMENT with something isn't neccessarily any indicator of actual perceived "experience". I once had to do a case review and identified a likely missale of personal of pensions (part company funded) where the guy had several options including a COMP and even an FS scheme. My BM observed that he "obviously liked personal pensions", a rather leggy adviser had sold him about six different ones, but in reallity he didn't have a clue.
I haven't seen any comments that correlated engagement with experience, perceived or otherwise. I think the overall message is that it should be personalised to the client's own situation.
In some cases the clients say they understand when they don't, and most of the time you have to take it at face value, unless you're going to make them sit an exam to demonstrate understanding!