Winners of this year’s Paraplanner Team of the Year Award is Clarion Wealth Planning Ltd.
Pictured: Alistair Cartwright, Paraplanner and Head of Advice Delivery, accepts the award on behalf of the team from Mollie Thornton, senior investment manager with the Awards’ sponsor Parmenion.
To celebrate the win at the Professional Paraplanner awards, the entire Clarion paraplanning team travelled from Alderley Edge, Cheshire, to London, staying in a hotel overnight, paid for by their bosses. “It really was a team effort to win the awards and reflected the way we work as a team in the office,” says Alistair Cartwright, paraplanner and Head of Advice Delivery.
The firm operates in defined teams of financial planner, paraplanner and administrator, providing financial planning to a set group of clients. “We offer a very bespoke service to our clients. This means every member of the team knows the clients, knows their goals and aspirations and knows what is happening with a particular case. The paraplanners go into the meetings with the planners.”
At the same time, Alistair says, the team (paraplanner and admin) not only comes together once a week to discuss workload and cases, “we share ideas on specific cases and we will collaborate on complex cases; we will bring other paraplanners in to look at things with a different eye and maybe come up with a new angle. Then we will bring in the financial planner to discuss what we have come up with. It’s a team centric, multi-layered approach.”
One of the new initiatives brought in by the team has been to create a suite of documents that outlines a family’s core values and aspirations. “We have new clients complete the document, then our first meeting will all be about what they want, not what they’ve got. We have the client think about what their wealth is for. Then we have the client set down one, three and 10 year goals, which we can help them to achieve.”
Talking about the team , Alistair says: “We’re career paraplanners and we’re all passionate about paraplanning. We share Clarion’s ethos and really want to do well for our clients. We’re all like-minded people and we socialise out of work as well.”
Alistair won the In-house Paraplanner of the Year award in 2020. “We’ve had a lot of reaction from clients to the team award, probably more than when I won,” he says. “I think that’s because it effects every client. We’ll definitely be entering the awards in 2023.”
