Professional Adviser Award 2008

 


 

  

Financial Education the Arch Way - by Arthur Childs, Chartered Financial Planner, updated: February 16, 2008

 

 

What is the best way for a small firm like ours to improve the knowledge of its clients in financial matters?  Many of our 4,400 clients are now living outside of our natural base of operations in the South East.

How much knowledge do our clients require? For examle, I am a Chartered Financial Planner but cannot expect our clients to want to study for years as I have.

The theory of knowledge management states the importance of ensuring that the right information is delivered to the right person at the right time, defined as ‘just in time’, in order to take the most appropriate decision.  In that sense, we believe that the theory of knowledge management holds the key for us.  It is not a question of managing knowledge per se, but relating that knowledge to its usage by our clients.

 

 

circle website

In order to improve the knowledge of our clients in the most practical way possible, given our size and limited resources, we decided that educating clients was about providing (1) relevant and easily understood knowledge, (2) to the clients who will need to use it, and (3) just at the time when they will need to use it (or at least when they are most likely to be able to assimilate it). We have therefore produced a ‘circle of knowledge’ that works as follows:

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The Circle of Knowledge

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Guides - a wealth of information in 'bite size' pieces

The foundation of the ‘circle of knowledge’ is here.  We have produced over 50 easily read Guides to provide background information on financial planning topics.  During the last 12 months we have written 8 new Guides and updated many of the others.

These free Guides use plain English, explain technical terms, make use of colour, frequent headings, short paragraphs, bold text, charts and tables, and are produced in both paper and pdf format.

The Guides are used extensively by the company’s 8 advisers.  The appropriate Guides are included with ‘suitability’ reports to provide background on topics covered in our advice.  Of course, there are major spin-off benefits for our small company in terms of consistent, accurate presentation of technical information and compliant pre-approved text being used by all of our advisers.

   asset allocation guide

 

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Topics - the present guides cover a wide range of topics

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  •   Investment Theory (eg Asset Allocation, Pound cost Averaging)
  •   Investment Asset Types (eg Commodities, Gilts, Property Funds)
  •   Investment Products (eg ISA, Investment Bonds, VCTs, With Profit Bonds)
  •   Investment Development (eg Multi Manager Funds, Nucleus Wrap)
  •   Pension Planning (eg Open Market Option, Unsecured Pension)
  •   Health Insurance (eg Care Fees Funds, Critical Illness, Income Protection)
  •   Taxation (eg CGT, Inheritance Tax, Investments and Age Allowance)
  •   State Benefits (eg State Pension, State Pension Benefit)
  •   Other Topics (eg Civil Partnerships, Help With Debt, Making A Will)

 

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Website - a wealth of information that is always readilly accessible

This is the next stage in the ‘circle of knowledge’.  Every time we produce a new Guide or update an existing one, we transfer the new or updated content to our website.

We have built an unusual website for a small IFA company in that it has a real depth of information that is freely available.  Rather than an off the shelf ‘me too’ IFA website we have therefore created something which works to deliver sufficient knowledge to our clients to enable them to make appropriate decisions.

Where possible, each section of the website includes a number of links to other sources of information on that topic.

Because of the structure of the website many of the topics covered receive extremely high rankings on Google (often first and second page).

 

 

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“Most IFA websites simply aren’t up to snuff and it doesn’t take much to make them better.  Arthur Childs of Arch Financial Planning is one who does it well.”

Richard Lander, Director, Citywire, 22 Nov 2006

 

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MoneyTalk - the vehicle that regularly delivers that information to clients

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MoneyTalk presently completes the ‘circle of knowledge’.  We send out an attractive html email to many hundreds of clients and others approximately once a month.  This is designed in the same format and colours as our website.

The key to MoneyTalk is its focus (on one topic), its brevity (usually no more than four or five paragraphs) and its ease of use (it usually contains a link to the section of our website where the reader can find further information on the topic).  In this way our clients are regularly directed back to our website and the printable pdf versions of our Guides. Over the last year topics have included:

  •   Help with debt
  •   Asset allocation – the investor’s plumb line
  •   Pre-Budget Report – as it affects investors
  •   Enduring power of attorney – last few days
  •   For ‘volatility’ read ‘opportunity’
  •   Cash – as an investment
  •   With profits bonds – not all the same
  •   Investing in commodities
  •   Budget 2007
  •   Investment outlook for 2007
  •   Long term care

 

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The Future

Over the coming months we will experiment with some changes to our financial education programme as follows:

  •   We will see if we can move MoneyTalk from monthly to fortnightly.  To achieve this, alternate issues of MoneyTalk will deal with a simple financial planning issue.
  •   We will see if we can send MoneyTalk by ‘snail mail’.  We will post a paper MoneyTalk to all our clients who do not receive the email version, once a quarter.  This will be a combination of all the other issues of MoneyTalk emailed over the last quarter and will include the respective Guides.
  •   We will see if we can get some of the other Arch advisers to write copy for our Guides in areas of their specialism.
  •   We will see if we can use the marketing-hub.  This company is starting to produce some attractive Guides which would be freely available to us. Although they do not have the depth of content of our Guides they could fill some gaps.
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If you would like to join the 'circle of knowledge'

To start benefitting from 'Financial Education the arch Way' you simply need to join the free subscription list for our monthly email bulletin MoneyTalk. You can, of course, unsubscribe at any time. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose by us, nor passed on to any other person or organisation.

If you would like to subscribe to MoneyTalk please email subscribe@arch-fp.co.uk. Please note that as we unfortunately also get spam messages to that address it would be helpful if you would put a short message such as 'Please add me to your free MoneyTalk subscription list. [Your name]' in the body of the email.

 

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Personal Advice

Please note that this information does not constitute personal advice and should not be treated as a substitute for specific advice based on your circumstances.  If there is any area of your financial planning that you are unsure about, then you should discuss the matter with a suitably qualified independent financial adviser such as ourselves.

If you would like to discuss any financial planning issue, please contact your Arch adviser, or email direct@arch-fp.co.uk, or telephone 0845 3700 661 .

 

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