I’m pleased to say we have great relationships with the financial advisers who choose to use our services and we refer to them as our ‘adviser partners’ rather than as our ‘clients’.
We use this terminology because we work together in a highly collaborative manner in order to provide an outstanding investment outcome to our shared clients – the end customer. To that end our investment and administration teams are always at the end of a phone – as are the rest of us – and we work closely with the advisers to provide solutions that work for their specific businesses.
Although we refer to them as partners in the context of our shared clients, the term can be misleading in some ways. They are, for example, not advisers with financial interests in PortfolioMetrix. In fact, the IFAs we work with in the UK take the term ‘independent’ incredibly seriously. Like the advisers we work with, PortfolioMetrix is an independent company able to make un-conflicted choices in how to build outstanding portfolios for our clients. This independence is how we like it.
I am prompted to spell this out as there are DFMs out there where the advisers who use them do have vested financial interests in the businesses and that’s not always clear to the outside world. That isn’t how PortfolioMetrix does business.
I’m proud that many of our adviser partners are happy to go on the record to talk about the benefits they find working with us gives them and their clients. They do this completely at their own discretion and not because of vested interests (unless you count being able to service their clients’ investment needs effectively and efficiently as ‘vested interests’).
On that note, here’s a great article from Nigel McTear (one of our adviser partners) about why it’s essential to pick the right investment partner: http://citywire.co.uk/new-model-adviser/news/avoid-fos-pain-by-picking-the-right-dfm-partner/a881024.
