The Process

Once the Initial Call Hander has completed their call with you, your details will be forwarded to the advice team. At this point the advice team will decide if any further information is required from you or from the scheme under review. They may need to contact you for further information, or to discuss your goals in greater detail. It is not unusual for us to have to contact you on more than one occasion as part of this research stage.

Once we have details of the schemes under review, we will be in a position to calculate our fees. We will present this to you in a document called ‘Personalised Charges Document’. Once you have reviewed this you will be in a position to decide whether you accept the charges. This is the point in the process where you are asked to decide if you wish to proceed and where you commit to our charges.

If you accept the details contained in the Personalised Charges Document we will continue with our research, and in due course make a decision on our advice. Where we do not believe that it would be in your best interests to transfer or where your circumstances are unclear, we may issue an ‘Abridged Advice Report’ (this is a shortened form of advice) this type of advice can only be used where we do not believe that transfer is in your interests.

We may also complete a Full Advice Report. When a Full Advice Report is completed, it is initially in ‘draft’ form as we need to confirm your understanding before we can proceed.

When the Preliminary report is completed, we will contact you to discuss the contents. During this call we will ensure that the advice is in line with your needs and objectives and we will also check your understanding of the advice and that you are clear on the risks involved in proceeding with our advice. This affirmation call has to take place before we can issue our finalised advice.

Following the ‘Affirmation Call’ we may need to make some changes to our preliminary report. Once these are completed we will then issue our suitability report alongside any documents such as the forms to take the scheme pension or the forms to transfer away from the scheme. If you wish to proceed with the advice we have provided then you will need to check the documents and complete and return them to us.

Where we have advised an action such as to take the scheme pension or to transfer the pension we will complete various administrative acts to complete the advice. This will include sending the various forms to the relevant parties. If we have recommended transfer, the scheme has 3 months to arrange the transfer, although the trustees of the scheme may make various requests which may delay the payment of any transfer value to a new scheme.