Choosing an expat financial planning advisor is an important decision. Especially, when you’re considering to transfer your UK pension to the US, there are a lot of regulations that you are not familiar with. Particularly with the products you are being offered, you have no idea what the benefits and the drawbacks are. It is the job of your Independent Financial Advisor (IFA) to help you with these important decisions.
Cameron James expat financial planning is an FCA-regulated IFA firm based in UK, we have been helping clients in 27 countries including the USA. However, what is the reason of clients trusting us as their IFA? In this article, we will give you reasons why clients choose us, as well as the reason clients don’t choose us, to provide you with a balanced argument.
Before that, let’s watch a video from our CEO and Independent Financial Advisor, Dominic James Murray, explaining all the reasons briefly in one of our YouTube video below. Visit our channel if you find our video is relevant to you, or you want the newest update from the UK pension industry.
Why Did Clients Submit Their Enquiries to Us?
Following a successful UK pension transfer, we do an onboarding feedback survey of all of our clients. And we have a number of range of questions which we ask them, and we always get the same similar responses back from them when we ask them, “Why did you first leave your enquiry with Cameron James expat financial planning?”.
Normally, they always say that they were doing their research online and that we came up on YouTube or Google, they really like the quality of our content, they could see that we put time and effort into it. They just got a feeling that we know what we’re talking about. There’s a lot of stuff about transparency on our website, no hidden commissions, no charges, they just felt comfortable with us or at least that we should be one of the companies that they shortlisted from that moment.
High Quality of Service
The second thing why clients choose us and what clients always say about us is our level of service from day one. We will answer your calls straight away and from the moment you book an initial consultation with us, we started going through the process very quickly. We are always here and ready to act. You may have an experience with advisory firms who don’t call you back for days or weeks, which is not a good start to a relationship.
At Cameron James expat financial planning, we will always prioritize getting in touch with you as soon as possible. We know what it’s like when we’re looking for a lawyer or an accountant we might leave two to three inquiries on the best websites that we see, then the ones that call us back first we think that they want to do business with us. If you’re going to give them money and pay large fees, you want to know that you’re going to have high-quality service.
Speed of Service
Another point that clients always talk about us is the speed in which we get things done for them. Clients very often say that the paperwork was done so quickly. At Cameron James expat financial planning, we actually have a team who work on different shifts. What this means is we almost have a 24-hour support model. We manage to get two to three days work done inside one day because we have different shifts working alternatively. Our team pass over the work from one another at the end of their shift, which means that we can turn things around typically quicker than other advisory firms who just have one shift of staff working at one period of time.
No Surprises
In terms of other stuff that we hear from clients is that we are very transparent. Our clients also say that we explain our costs clearly in our report, even we included all the small dealing charges that there might be, as well as the underlying cost of the funds, we made everything very clear. Compared to other financial advisors who perhaps only stated their initial charge and the ongoing cost, they didn’t go into detail of what was actually the cost of the underlying funds.
Here at Cameron James expat financial planning, we’d always show you as a pound and as a percentage amount, how much your initial charges and how much our ongoing charges in our industry. There’s no avoiding cost, it’s there, and it’s significant to know that it’s very costly to operate in this industry. We can’t do things very cheaply, so instead we try to show our clients exactly what our costs are and be very transparent with it.
Highly Qualified IFAs
The next reason why clients like working with us is, all of our financial advisors are highly qualified. Typically, all of our IFAs’ background is in economics. As such, none of us are ex-car salesmen or whatever that is not relevant with what we do. There is nothing wrong with car salesmen, but people who had another career, and now they’ve suddenly moved into the financial advice industry is an obvious red flag for Cameron James expat financial planning. All advisors at Cameron James expat financial planning are people who want to have 5-20 of their lifetime career being a financial advisor.
This is important because we want to build up clients and look after them over the long term. This also means that throughout your retirement, you can have a financial advisor who can typically work with you over the long term.
Another point is, as a young company, we’re not really interested in working with older financial advisors. We’ve been there and tried training them. In the end, they can’t even use applications that will easily help their work, or even they can’t use computers. This is a technological age and in this environment, a lot of older financial advisors can’t handle that. They need someone else to do all the work for them, but also they’re very frequently set in their ways they’re stuck in.
The world has moved on, costs have come down, solutions have changed, younger financial advisors, in our opinion, are more up to date. They follow the markets more closely, they read more articles, and older people typically as they’re approaching their retirement years, there’s a bit of a conflict of interest because they’re not going to be working for that many years left.
They might want to charge a little more where they can to try to increase their retirement income, whilst younger financial advisors have a longer-term track record as well as longer-term ability to earn money. As such, they can be a little slower in their approach and build up a good base of clients.
Why Client Haven’t Worked With Us?
To give you a balanced argument, we’d like to point out some reasons why clients haven’t worked with Cameron James expat financial planning. Not every single client we speak to always signs up with us. Occasionally, some clients just come down to cost and the problem with cost is it’s not the cost that you can see that will hurt you, it’s a cost you cannot see that will hurt you. Some clients feel that £3,500 for the report fee and transfer fees is outrageous. The UK Pension Industry is a very difficult industry to get into, and there is no such free lunch in financial services. They will typically be taking a high commission because no one can work for free.
Do You Have Questions About Us?
Don’t hesitate to ask for anything related to your UK pension transfer or anything you would like to know about Cameron James expat financial planning. Our IFAs are here to help you to clarify things and to give you the financial advice that you need. Hit the button on the right side to book your free initial consultation with us.
