Financial Counselling Services for Companies

The Concept

As an employer, IAS believes that there are times when you can play an important role in helping to safeguard the financial interests of your employees by providing them with access to professional and truly independent financial advice. For example, financial counselling might typically be made available to senior executives or in special circumstances, e.g. as part of a pre-retirement or redundancy programme.

From your perspective, buying in external advice of this nature poses two key questions:

• Is the advisor in business to provide genuinely impartial advice or are there conflicts of interest (such as in-house investment management services or a reliance on commission as the prime source of remuneration) that are likely to interfere with his objectivity?
  
  
• Is the advisor properly qualified to offer the breadth of experience necessary to cover the wide range of issues that are likely to arise?

In our experience, the traditional financial services marketplace remains narrowly focused and predominantly sales driven and is ill equipped, therefore, to deliver genuine advisory services of the sort you and your employees require.

What makes us so different?

• We view our role as largely educational and try to explain in simple terms how to avoid the more common financial pitfalls individuals are apt to fall into.
  
  
• We are not interested in using our financial counselling services as a platform to sell insurance products or other services to your employees. We have no axe to grind in the background.
  
  
• We specialise in providing these services and have over 10 years experience in this field, working with a range of Plc. and other clients.
  
  
• IAS is truly independent and our advice is provided on an agreed fee basis.
  
  
• IAS provides jargon-free practical advice in a manner that is readily understandable to a wide-ranging audience.

Our role is to illuminate, not obfuscate!

The IAS range of services

We have developed a range of financial counselling services which are flexible and can be adapted to meet your specific requirements, as follows:-

• Advice on redundancy

  a) Pre-decision advice - helping your employees to understand the benefits that may be on offer under the terms of a severance scheme.
  
  b) On leaving service - advising your employees on all aspects of their personal financial affairs on cessation of employment and on how to make the most of their resources during this difficult period. Typically this would normally cover issues relating to tax, termination payments, pensions, DSS benefits, share option/SAYE schemes and investment matters generally. IAS also advises on and implements suitable temporary life cover where there may be a gap between employment and where a dependant need arises.

• Advice on retirement

  We aim to assist your employees in planning an investment strategy which they are comfortable with. IAS takes great care to ensure that individuals understand both the risk associated with any given investment and the costs associated with making that investment. Our aim is to explain to individuals how they might gain access to investment products at much lower cost than would normally apply in the marketplace.
  
  Such decisions have potentially serious long-term financial consequences and IAS has designed a financial counselling seminar which we believe will significantly enhance your employees' long term wealth prospects by helping them to avoid the more common pitfalls.

• to promote a better understanding of the financial services marketplace and to help identify reasons why this does not always serve the best interests of the consumer.
  
  
• to enable individuals to take greater responsibility for planning their financial requirements by providing them with some simple rules of thumb.
  
  
• to help individuals obtain real value for money when purchasing financial products.

Service Delivery

We are able to provide advice to your employees either in a group seminar-workshop format or on a one to one basis, as required. We offer access to fully qualified widely experienced practitioners.