What do you charge for your services?

This will depend upon the nature of the advice required and the time and expertise involved. Wherever possible, once we have discussed your specific requirements, we will write to you setting out the terms of the prospective engagement, indicating the basis for our remuneration. Wherever possible, we seek to offer clients absolute cost certainty up front. We will not commence work for a client until costs have been agreed.

What about insurance/investment commissions? How do you treat these?

As mentioned above, we offer a service on a remuneration basis agreed in advance. Depending on the nature of the assignment, this may be purely fee-based, purely commission-based or a mixture of the two. The nature of the financial services industry at present is such that most product providers (e.g. insurance companies/unit trust groups) pay commission to third party independent advisors such as IAS for recommending their particular products. The levels of commission paid, both initial and renewal, are broadly prescribed by the industry but do vary from product to product and from company to company. Initial commission may be used by the firm to offset its fees but can be waived, in whole or part, to provide you with enhanced investment terms in appropriate circumstances (see below).

Investment Commissions
You may require advice which involves the firm recommending a specific investment product which, if implemented, would give rise to the firm receiving a commission payment from the product provider. Where we regard the standard rates of commission payable to be excessive, relative to the time and expertise involved in providing the advice, we are prepared to negotiate a commission rebate with the product provider, leading to enhanced investment terms for your benefit. Alternatively, should you prefer, we are happy to work on a pure fee basis, agreed in advance, in which case we would be able to negotiate preferential "nil commission" investment terms on your behalf. Occasions will arise where we believe it is in your best interests for us to charge you a fee for our services. Equally, there are times when we will advise you that it is in your best interests for IAS to receive a commission payment from the product provider rather than having to charge you a fee, possibly attracting VAT in addition. At other times it may be more appropriate for us to work on a part fee/part commission basis. Our main concern is to ensure that where commission arises in respect of a particular investment recommendation, you understand the impact that this has on the underlying investment product charges. Where a fee has been agreed, this will normally be invoiced on completion of the work, unless otherwise agreed and is payable within 14 days of issue.

Renewal Investment Commissions
Renewal investment commissions may be paid in respect of certain investment products (e.g. PEPs and ISAs). The amount of renewal commission to be received by IAS, if any, will be disclosed to you at the outset and will be used to defray on-going servicing costs or in discounting initial advisory costs.

Commissions received by IAS in respect of non-investment business (e.g. risk benefits)
As a matter of course, because of the nature of the insurance marketplace, the firm does not adopt a fee-based approach where we advise on certain non-investment classes of business, e.g. where we are required to advise on appropriate life assurance or disability insurance arrangements. In such circumstances, we seek to provide you with access to competitively priced insurance cover drawn from the marketplace of insurance companies who attract new business from third party intermediaries such as IAS and who pay commission for such new business introductions. Unless otherwise agreed at the outset, we will not charge you for our research efforts in this area nor will we charge you should you decide for whatever reason not to proceed with our recommendations. We will account to you for any commission earned. Our view is that it is never in a client's interest to pay fees (incurring VAT) for this type of advice which is why, in our experience, there is no demand for fee-based advice in this area.

Who will I deal with and are they qualified to provide the quality of advice I need?

All advice is provided at partner level so you access fully qualified/professional practitioners with over 20 years experience in the financial planning field. Our "Technical Memoranda" and "Case Studies" give a flavour of our approach.

Where can I meet you and is this a requirement for you to provide me with advice?

Normally meetings are held at our London office or some other convenient location in central London. If this is not convenient we will endeavour to meet you at some other location (we travel widely as part of our normal activities) although such travel costs would be reflected in the costs charged. Although we prefer to meet clients before acting on their behalf, it is not always absolutely necessary if the relevant background information can be dealt with effectively on the phone or via correspondence/email.

Will I have to pay VAT on the fees charged?

This depends upon the type of advice we are providing. Where IAS are involved in "arranging" an investment product as part of the advisory process, any fees charged for this part of the service are exempt from VAT. This generally means for most private client work that no VAT is charged on fees. We will agree this with you at the outset. If any initial commissions are used to cover advisory costs, these are exempt from VAT.

Why do I need an adviser? Surely I can access any financial product over the internet now and avoid paying advisory fees?

If you are confident in your knowledge and understanding of the financial services marketplace, are familiar with the range of insurance, mortgage, savings, investment and pension products available, understand the relevant tax, trust and pensions legislation governing these, can then access the full range of available products, distill from this range those that may be relevant to your circumstances, sort out the wheat from the chaff and have the stamina left over to deal with and obtain value for money from the chosen product providers yourself, then you do not need an experienced adviser to act on your behalf. This is because you are one! On a more serious note, you are right to question the necessity of taking professional advice if by doing so you are incurring costs which are not balanced by added value. We will tell you when we believe we can add value and when we cannot.

I am interested - how do I progress matters and how much does it cost for an initial consultation/review?

In the first instance, you should contact one of the partners to discuss your particular requirements. As a result of this, we will normally be able to establish quickly whether we can help you and what the prospective costs are likely to be. It may be that you simply wish us to undertake a review of your general financial position to check that you are not missing any glaringly obvious tricks. This would involve a meeting and follow up report, suggesting the actions (if any) you might consider taking for which we will charge a flat fee of £250. This process will involve your completing a broad-brush financial questionnaire in advance of our meeting to give us a picture of your circumstances. We regard this as "Phase 1" of the advisory process. Charging for this ensures that we are able to spend the time necessary to familiarise ourselves properly with your circumstances and objectives - essential if we are to offer properly considered recommendations.
It may be that following this initial review, a number of recommendations emerge. Where the recommendations are relatively straightforward, we may suggest that you implement them yourself, rather than incur avoidable costs in having us implement the changes for you (an example of this might be to switch a building society account).

Often, however, following our recommendations, there will be a need for more involved on-going advice, either to restructure existing arrangements or to assist in on-going aspects (e.g. investment) of your affairs. In this case, we would move to what we describe as "Phase 2" (the implementation phase) when we would agree with you in advance a remuneration basis for completing the tasks identified or for continuing to act on your behalf in the future, as deemed appropriate by you.