Jade Connolly, head of Paraplanning at Thomas Miller Investment, believes paraplanners have a fantastic opportunity at the moment to shape their own careers.
Jade finished her A-Levels in 2009 and is now Chartered (looking to Fellow of the CII) and head of a small team of paraplanners, which will grow as the firm takes on more business.
“I think that as a paraplanner, currently, you can shape that role into what you want it to be, to a certain extent. There are multiple definitions of what a paraplanner is and it depends on what you want to do and where you are going to work as to what the role will look like,” Jade says.
That belief is probably no better illustrated than by Jade’s own career path. She left sixth form wanting to go into banking and law. Eschewing a several-year stint at university she chose instead to go the practical route and found a job as a researcher in an adviser business in Norfolk – Ring Associates. It was a small, family-run wealth management firm with, at the time, 450 clients and six advisers. This, she says, gave her an understanding of the industry and what a financial adviser did. “I learned a lot from the owner of the firm, Simon Ring, and I decided while I was there that I wanted to become an adviser. I liked the client contact and being in front of people and talking. That appealed to me, as did the fact that there were qualifications involved which meant there were goals to strive for and a career path.”
Her role at the time mainly was undertaking fund research and running the fund switching service, but she also had some client contact and wrote suitability reports. She reached diploma level while at the firm.
However, she says, she wasn’t getting a lot of exposure to the technical side of the advice service and so after two years she moved into a defined paraplanner role with Ashcourt Rowan. The firm recently moved from a set up of regional paraplanning units to a centralised proposition, serving advisers spread around the country. Being part of a centralised paraplanning unit dealing with advisers remotely was a totally different set up to working for a small regional adviser business and Jade says her work experience as well as her technical development “went on a steep learning curve”.
She spent two years there in a team that grew both in size and presence within the company – from four to 12 paraplanners – during which time she took on team leader duties. “What I learned there was how to deal with a lot of different individuals – there were 65 advisers working nationwide, so we were working remotely which was a new skill to learn as well. I was lucky enough to be mentored by some of the more senior paraplanners and I got to chartered status while at Ashcourt Rowan,” she says.
Dealing with most of the advisers remotely, only five were based in London, mainly by email and telephone “was quite challenging in terms of relationship building – and trying to explain concepts over email was very challenging!” she adds,
To help build the relationship with the advisers, whenever the advisers were in London for technical and team days, the paraplanners made sure they attended too. “Also, I went out to see the advisers in the regions when I could. After a while you found that once they knew a bit more about you and they understood more about the way we worked, that they were on board with the process.”
It was at Ashcourt Rowan that she also saw where she wanted to take her career, which was no longer into advising. “I began taking on more team leader responsibility and I realised this was what I wanted to do going forward, taking what I have learned in a technical capacity and to teach others and come into a new firm with new challenges.”
So, in June 2014, Jade moved to Thomas Miller Investment, hired to lead the paraplanning team. This again was a new environment, as all the adviser were based in the London office – until the company acquired Broadstone Wealth Management Ltd in September 2014, bringing around £400m in new assets to the company, with Offices from Glasgow to Southampton.
Following the acquisition – during which time Jade was involved in ensuring everything ran smoothly from a paraplanning perspective, as the paraplanning team was centralised in London and reduced from 10 to three – Thomas Miller has 11 advisers, based in London (8), Southampton (3) and Birmingham (1). Jade’s team of three paraplanners serves all 11 advisers from the London office.
Having a team of three works, Jade says. “We have a three week turnaround for reports, that’s from start through research, reviews, sit down with the consultant, packaging up, external compliance and out of the door to the client.”
Getting the systems and processes just right has been essential, she says. “We work very hard as a team on analysing the things that are done over and over again and putting them into a centralised system. This was experience she brought with her from Ashcourt. “When you are dealing remotely with 65 advisers you couldn’t have 12 paraplanners all working in 12 different ways, you had to have standard procedures and practices to follow. I brought that knowledge here and with the team have created our own system that ensures we are consistent in the way that we work.”
Working side-by-side
Having worked for a small firm and virtually with advisers sited around the country, one of the things Jade says she likes about the way the Thomas Miller operation is set up is that, with the majority of the advisers based in the London office, the paraplanners work literally alongside the advisers. “It means I can walk over to someone’s desk if I need to and vice versa,” she says.
The three paraplanners work across all the advisers, which Jade believes is the best way to work in this environment. “We share the workload, with no one individual assigned to an adviser, which I think works, because no one person is tied to a particular style. You often find that advisers have a particular way of working and they are familiar with certain products schemes and plans. If you work with 11 advisers at once then you get the best of both worlds as you can find out about new products and suggestions, and the chance to combine ideas, which I think produces a better outcome for the clients.”
Working in close proximity to the advisers also means there can be team input where issues crop up or there is a particularly complex case. “We sit closely on a bank of desks and the advisers are sitting around us, so ideas are often being talked about across the desks. Also, we have a white board at the back of the room on which we often plan out our ideas. With the advisers sitting in close proximity the process can be very interactive,” Jade says.
The paraplanning team works as the technical hub for the advisers. “We are expected to be up-to-date with industry and product changes and to know not just current information but to be able to deal with historic issues. We do come across clients with products dating back 30 years, which we are expected to be able to analyse and assess whether moving the client out of those legacy products is in their best interests.
“From what I’ve seen, I think our relationship with the advisers is different to many other firms. We are often described as the gateway to the advice in that while the advisers discuss the advice with the client we are expected to scope that advice – so we won’t just take instruction write a report and hand it back to the consultant, there is conversation and discussion that goes on to ensure the outcome is the best solution for the client. We sit between compliance and the advisers as business generators. That way, also, we learn what works and what doesn’t work in different situations.”
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