As adviser roles diminish and banks and insurance companies aren’t employing financial advisers, there’s much less opportunity for graduates to enter the IFA sector. There are lots of costs associated with training graduates, but I believe there is a place for them and I think the best method of getting graduates into the profession is through entry level jobs, starting off in administration and so on and then giving them an all-round education within the firm. This is som

Pension Changes Unsurprisingly the pension changes are the biggest to impact IFAs, their clients and potential clients You can read more about the multitude of pension changes (link back to article) in my previous post, but here’s a summary of ways these changes can mean opportunity for advisers. As you are aware the 55% tax charge applied on death for lump sums from vested pension funds or funds from someone over 75 at the time of death is changing. This will have a signif

With the new changes in pension rules leading to the increased flexibility in how pension pots can be taken at retirement, the government announced it will be offering Pension Guidance for anyone, free of charge. When this was first announced, understandably it produced an awful lot of chatter around exactly who would be delivering this guidance, in what form it would take, and who would be covering the costs. At the time of writing this there are just 20 weekends before Pe

Businesses are rather like living organisms in that they adapt and evolve to fit the environment around them. To extend the analogy, successful businesses and species change with the environment and those that don’t eventually cease to exist. For some types of advisory businesses, RDR was the equivalent of a meteorite, but there is still scope to survive. The most vulnerable of all business models in the sector at the moment is the IFA network, purely because many are lacking

In my previous post I talked about the opportunities and the challenges facing IFAs in the next five years following the RDR and the end of legacy commission. Let’s continue the discussion in this post and focus on the technological changes that will be shaping the industry in the second half of the decade. As I’ve mentioned the marketplace is emptying of competitors. RDR and the end of commissions including legacy commissions in April 2016, combined with ever greater regulat

We work in a regulatory landscape transformed by RDR, and as with all such changes for some it’s too much change and for others it’s an opportunity. There are going to be ways to capitalise on these changes and this post will explore what opportunities lie ahead for IFAs in the next five years. You already know a lot of advisers left the sector in the run up to RDR leaving the rest of us with far less competition than we’ve previously faced. Attracting clients for remaining