What is an Independent Financial Adviser?

· 2 min read
What is an Independent Financial Adviser?

At the risk of sounding facetious, an independent financial adviser is a person who gives independent suggestions about financial matters. In fact, stating the rather obvious in this manner put an important pressure on the three vital the different parts of the independent financial adviser's role.

Independent

The independence of the adviser is critical. When an unbiased financial adviser is consulted, you should know that she or he does not have any vested interest and will not be influenced at all by selling a single company's products.  Go to this website  means that the client can get the adviser to do something completely impartially, entirely in the client's needs, and not since there is an established dependent relationship between your adviser and one particular supplier. The importance of this independence can't be stressed enough. The adviser has to be licensed by and is regulated by the Financial Services Authority, and independence is something that is central to such recognition. The client's faith and trust in the adviser stems largely from the latter's independence.

Financial

An independent financial adviser will need expert professional knowledge of a huge range of financial loans and services. Because it has one of the highly developed financial services industries on the globe, the sheer selection of products on the British market means that knowledge and professionalism should be of the highest order.



Due to the sheer range of subjects with which an independent financial adviser must be familiar, you will find a correspondingly wide range of qualifications open to individual advisers. For example, the adviser may have professional qualifications awarded by the Chartered Financial Analysts (CFA) Institute, the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII), the Institute of Financial Planning (IFP), the non-public Finance Society (PFS), the Pensions Management Institute (PMI, the Securities and Investment Institute (SII), or others. Above all, however, the adviser knows that his is a constantly changing market, with new products and services emerging constantly. He or she will make it his or her business to stay completely up to date with these trends.

Adviser

As an adviser, the 3rd and vital element of the independent financial adviser's role harks back to the first of his or her qualities, independence. The financial advice given must be "best advice" when recommending any product or service. In other words, the advice must be the advice that is genuinely in the client's best interest. It is as if the adviser had stepped into the client's shoes and was giving advice entirely from the client's perspective. In this manner, the client could be assured that the advice is truly independent, objective and impartial advice that may satisfy the interests that the client himself or herself has identified.

Summary

It is surprising the amount of meaning can be packed in to the three words that describe the role of the independent financial adviser. But because the above brief, thumb-nail sketchy has shown, each one of the three words encapsulates a fundamental and vital section of this professional's job. Each word describes the obligations that the adviser has towards each of his clients, so the clients, because of their part, can rest absolutely assured that they receive genuinely independent, well-informed and expert financial advice that will aid their own needs.