When choosing a financial adviser, it’s important that both parties feel like it’s a great fit.

You need to do your due diligence to confirm that we can provide you with the level of service and expertise that you expect. We also need to make sure that you are the right fit for us.

Because we provide a highly personalised service, we are limited to the number of new relationships that we can take on each year. At certain times this may mean a short waitlist before we are able to onboard new clients. We’ll always be transparent about this during our initial conversation.

If you’re unsure whether we’d be the right fit, we’d always encourage you to get in touch. We may be able to suggest alternative options. We also offer the ability to build a cashflow model and financial plan for any client, even if we don’t take them onboard. This gives you the blueprints to action everything yourself at a low cost.

Please reach out via the contact page for any questions, to book in a consultation or to arrange a call.

The areas we are looking at when advising whether a client would be the right fit are:

Value of advice

It needs to be clear that we would add significant value to you over the long term, where you will objectively and consistently be getting a strong return from the relationship. If we do not feel that this is the case then we will explain why, especially if you can do something yourself at a lower cost.

Assets under management

To make sure that the relationship works for us commercially, the minimum our clients have in investable assets (pension, investment, cash, etc) is £200,000. Sometimes this may need to be more if you have particularly complicated needs, or if you are at the stage of retirement, etc. Sometimes we may take a long-term view on this. For example, if you do not have £200,000 in investable assets, but are planning on contributing to pensions and investments each year, so that we will reach this minimum within a few years.

Relationship

When we take on a client we are looking to work with them for decades and the relationship formed during that time is always very strong. Client surveys in the industry highlight that, overwhelmingly, the most important thing about their financial adviser is the relationship. This is also extremely important to us. Do we both feel like we would get on and enjoy our meetings? Are you looking to build a relationship where you can trust us with your most important financial decisions?

For clients that we can’t onboard, we always offer the option to build a cashflow model and financial plan, so that they can action this themselves for a one-off fee.

The value of an investment with St. James's Place will be directly linked to the performance of the funds selected and may fall as well as rise. You may get back less than the amount invested.