Administrator to paraplanner
Dan is a music technology graduate from the University of Hertfordshire and moved into financial services “partially of necessity”, he says, as he realised the chance of making a decent living off music was slim. He saw a role advertised for a trading team administrator at Selestia (one of the earliest advisory platforms which was bought by Skandia and is now part of Old Mutual Wealth), where he stayed until 2007 before joining Truestone Asset Management as an administrator. He became a paraplanner – termed technical consultant within Truestone – in 2010 and was recently promoted to senior technical consultant with the firm. In October 2014 Truestone Asset Management changed its name to EQ Investors and saw John Spiers, founder of BestInvest, take the helm.
What has attracted Dan to paraplanning from the very first days with Selestia, he says, apart from an interest in the technical side of the role, is the ability to look at a person’s circumstances and to find a solution for them, “to know you are having some kind of impact on people and their lives”.
He feels his degree has helped him in this and in his career. “There are some very creative individuals that work in the Music Technology department at my old Uni who were always making us think outside the box. That way of thinking, looking at things from different angles not just the obvious one, is a mindset that I’ve found really useful for my paraplanning role.”
EQ Investors has around £500m under management and runs its own discretionary portfolio service. The wealth team consists of 13 advisers, three portfolio analysts, 10 administrators and six paraplanners.
Reporting to the technical director, Dan is in charge of the paraplanning team. He describes the paraplanning role at the firm as having two functions: first is acting as the technical resource, being up-to-date with the latest news, industry and regulatory changes and being able to answer questions on them and apply them to the situations that the advisers are encountering; second is helping review the finances of the firm’s 400+ clients a year, reviewing the portfolios, dealing with new business and report writing.
Dan’s role as senior technical consultant includes distributing the work amongst the team, “taking into account people’s different skill sets”, and also going to see clients with the advisers “when they need the support of a technical consultant for more complex technical questions”.
Cashflow planning has become a large part of his role, he adds, including presenting to the client. “We have found that there are some advisers who really enjoy doing that on their own, which is great, but sometimes it can be interesting to introduce a new person to that process because as the technician I can ask the awkward questions of the client, or the questions that perhaps haven’t been asked in the past in that relationship.”
Team meetings
Monday morning team meetings, Dan says, “allow for a heads-up session to see where everybody’s at, who’s around in the office and who’s out taking on exams. It’s also a time when people will talk about any issues they’ve encountered and discuss any changes to legislation. “But we all sit together on a bank of desks so it’s very easy to have a free flowing conversation through out the day if we need it,” Dan says.
“Also, where there are regulatory changes, such as those to pensions as happened in the Budget, then either myself or the technical director will send an email out to the consultants team outlining the changes and pointing out where there good resources to look at and read through,” Dan adds.
Given the size of the firm, the paraplanning team uses templates for the majority of its reports, Dan says. “It’s really the only way you can make sure that you’ve got everything covered that needs to be in there and that there’s a consistent style. The templates are constantly being refined, he adds, to make them “as readable and accessible as possible; they are an ongoing work in progress”.
Generally, the reports take the form of a one-page introduction and summary, which gives the client the key points to take away and understand and the key recommendations. This leads into the body of the report, which covers the main points the client needs to know to inform those recommendations, and the appendices cover the regulatory and procedural aspects that are necessary but may not be directly relevant to the recommendations to the client.
With three investment analysts within the firm Dan says the team bases most of the investment recommendations on the in-house model portfolios. “We make some limited decisions on funds but that will generally be in conjunction with the investment analysts.”
The firm runs six core portfolios, populated predominantly with actively managed funds, a separate Absolute Return Portfolio, a High Octane Portfolio, and also Multi-index Portfolios, a range of five portfolios using passive investments.
“But the jewels in our crown are our ethical portfolios, our Positive Impact Portfolios,” Dan says. “We have three risk levels, cautious, balanced and adventurous to which we apply an extra level of screening which identifies the funds that have a positive impact on the environment. We’ve seen over £20m go into those funds since we launched them about two years or so ago. As a company, part of our ethos is to help drive positive change in communities so we’ve been very involved in charities and micro finance in Sierra Leone and other countries.”
