Let’s talk about products

In the third blog responding to “This is Money” I want to talk about products.

The journalist and Gina Miller are missing the fundamentals of advice. Product is almost a by-product of the process. The product delivers the solution. With advice the first step is understanding someone’s needs and producing a plan to deliver on those goals and needs.

We have two services a bespoke service where we pick funds and build portfolios, without going into much detail clients have access to us 24 hours a day 365 days of the year, we meet fund managers and we provide clients with access to all the information we have so they feel comfortable with what we are doing. Perhaps as she says we are investment managers but I think we are a lot more than that.

Ultimately the bespoke service is there to deliver on the goals and is a by-product of what we do.

The second service we have is packaged, it’s the same process of identifying goals but clients have less access to us and we use more packaged solutions. The cost is less but again it is just a by-product of what we do.

We strongly believe in active managers and we believe good active managers can outperform in the long-term, however we believe there can be a place for ETFs or passive funds and that is not about cost.

The problem with where the journalist is coming from is again old fashioned. It is assumed that the adviser picks an ISA, picks a fund and doesn’t care about cost. It doesn’t work that way now.