Financial Marketing

I have been pondering this for a few days now since attending a seminar recently on business development post RDR, and today's announcement that AIFA (association of independent financial advisers) is to drop the independent part and welcome all non-bank advisers to their ranks has brought me to the point that I decided to articulate my view here.

We have taken our eyes off the ball!

Over the last few years I think the "independent sector" within UK financial services has really forgotten about what is arguably the most important part of our business - client acquisition!

If you think that you have something you can add to this site, then I would love to hear from you.

I have recently restructured the site to allow those who generously provide their knowledge and time to contribute to the site an opportunity to raise their profile and promote themselves, their products and their expertise to the readers of the blog.

I believe that contrbuting to this site could be a wonderful opportuniuty to highlight an industry issue to an attentive and interactive audience.

If you would be interested in submitting an article for publication I would ask you to contact me with your idea here

If I think your idea has merit and will be of beneficial interest to the readers then I will ask you to provide the following;

1. The article, either in "MS Word" or other word processor format
2. Your Bio: This is usually 1-2 paragraphs maximum and explains who you are and provides an opportunity for you to promote your website or product in a subtle manner.
3. A photograph, we need a picture of you preferably something professional - we will not use company logo's book covers etc.

Your bio will automatically be appended to every future article you write and will appear on your author profile page.

If we feel that your articles are exactly what this site needs then we will possibly offer you a user name and log-in for the front end of the site so that you can automatically publish future articles yourself. We still however reserve all editorial rights and will remove/edit anything that we feel is simply an advert and provides no benefit to the readers.

We reserve the right to refuse any article for any reason, even if we thought your premise was good. Usually the reasons are, readability, too superficial, uninteresting content, content not specific enough for the audience, content has been posted in multiple locations etc. You will simply be advised that the article does not meet our editorial standards.

Back in March 2009 I set up a private forums site dedicated to Independent Financial Advisers and Mortgage Brokers in the UK that belong to, one of the biggest financial networks, Sesame.

The members of the site are all independent professionals usually working in 1-5 man or woman companies, dealing face to face with their client base on any range of financial issues. The giving of financial advice in the UK is heavily regulated by the Financial Services Authority and as such advisers are swamped in constant learning and paperwork to keep up with the legislative burden. Training budgets on sales and marketing have dropped in many small firms to a unprecedented low. Many of the business firm owners that I talk to are struggling in the current climate to bring new clients through the door. I have a personal belief that in many cases this is due to 'salesmanship' having become some what of a dirty word. Sales and marketing knowledge having taken a back seat.

With this in mind, being an avid reader of sales, marketing and general self-improvement literature myself I thought it would be a good idea to set up a blog as an offshoot to this core site and invite the authors that I most admire to submit blogs around sales, marketing and perhaps some broader issues with a slant towards financial and mortgage advisers. Hopefully introducing advisers to new inspiration and learning

Although the core forum site is private the blog will be public, for the benefit of everyone.

I'm relying on the generosity of experts to keep this blog fresh and interesting.

If you want to suggest an expert for me to contact or you are an expert and would be willing to publish a guest blog entry on this site then please drop me a line so that we can discuss your idea.

Unfortunately I think with this blog post I bring bad tidings.

I think it has been well documented that many IFAs do not intend to continue with their business post RDR. Instead for the majority the plan seems to be to build up as much trail or renewal commission within the business with the intention of building up its value with the ultimate aim of a profitable sale just before RDR hits.

With the logic of the pre-RDR world that a business is valued based upon its level of renewal or passive income and the FSAs assurances that any trail arrangements put in place before the RDR curtain falls would be regarded as historic and in some way protected.

This logic still stands up if your intention is not to retire but rather continue with the growth of the business however it falls down if you plan to retire! The FSA have indicate that in the post RDR world that every new client must agree their remuneration with their adviser and that on a transfer of Agency, trail will not be automatically transferred on to the new adviser who must instead put together a remuneration agreement with his new client.

If the above seems a little unclear let's try and talk it through with a few worked examples.

When I originally started this blog I had no intention of posting myself preferring instead to try and attract posts from Sales & Marketing experts who could perhaps offer some insight in to how we as IFAs and mortgage brokers should be marketing our services and communicating what we can do to the general public. As the blog has aged however it has been quite difficult to keep up the pace of inviting guest bloggers and organising their posts etc. So recently I decided to throw the blog open to all IFAs and Mortgage intermediaries who felt they had something useful to tell others. If you are interested in submitting a post to the blog then please drop me an email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it detailing what you would like to post about don't write the whole blog as I might not think it's a suitable subject, just send a summary.

I don't feel that I am really qualified to position myself as some sort of IFA marketing expert so I thought I would kick off by drawing your attention to a document that I think every independent financial adviser and mortgage intermediary should have read by now yet I have seen no mention of it in the financial press.