Pennymatters was set up with one clear mantra, to develop a utopia for the client and also the advisers including any employees. The long term aim is to be noticed for exemplary client service in an industry which we think spends too much time focussing on its own needs and not the clients.
Firstly this means we will be completely transparent with our fees and costs. It is important that clients know and understand what is being paid and what this is for. We pride ourselves on designing processes which allow advisers to operate more easily and thus keep our costs low. Clients will have the choice of payment via fees, monthly or annual retainers or commission if acceptable and the only relevant solution. Payment could also be from a combination of all three and we think will be less than the average IFA practice.
Most Pensions, ISA’s, OEIC’s, Unit Trusts, Investment Trusts and Investment Bonds all have underlying investments.
There are thousands of different funds with varying risks and performance. At Pennymatters we try to apply common sense to the world of fund choice. This has meant we have put a small team together to decide on low, medium and high risk portfolios but taking into consideration ‘bigger’ picture issues. We do not believe that you can solve a credit crisis with more credit and as such we are very wary of fixed income investments. Either some of those investments will not be repaid or with higher interest rates the capital value of the underlying investments will go down. We also believe that UK property based funds may have further to fall and prefer to avoid these sorts of funds. Where we do believe future long term growth will come from is varied but does include Agriculture, Energy, Japan and some Emerging economies.
We have developed low medium and high risk portfolios for all the major investment and pension providers. The underlying funds can be chosen from the existing policy fund range or by selecting new funds with a different provider. This allow us to avoid the continual recycling of clients’ funds and the ‘fitting square peg into round hole’ syndrome which many advisers follow just to create new business. We will happily avoid unnecessary changes to existing arrangement but offer the client better alternatives on many occasions to their existing planning without the need to make transfers. Most clients do not realise that most existing pension or investment providers not only offer free switching internally, but with that have many fund choices.
We can give clients an indication of both volatility (a measure of how much a particular unit price increases and decreases over a given period) and maximum downside (a measure that indicates the maximum a particular portfolio has fallen from its peak to trough over a given period) which we compare against relevant benchmarks. We can apply these measures over the last 3 years which will include the worst post war recession thus giving our clients a far better understanding of how much ‘risk’ is associated with any particular portfolio. The portfolios are monitored to ensure the best possible outcomes are achieved and our clients will be provided with individual meetings at least once a year to both update performance and ensure the portfolio meets with individuals’ risk.We avoid over fancy unnecessary reports which not only waste paper but are not desired by the client
We want clients to take ownership of their affairs and have designed our processes and ongoing advice to fall into our ‘Ownership Solution’, which we feel offers better value for money and time invested for the client.
Our annual ‘Clarity Report’ does exactly that and gives each client the freedom to get on with their lives with confidence that they have optimised their financial planning to their own desires.