This may sound like a non-issue from outside the world-of-financial-advice bubble. It is the bain, however, of the daily working lives of many of us, particularly of those paid by we advisers to do the dirty work of dealing with the many providers with whom we have to work. To provide advice to, in particular, new clients, we have to find out what you already have in place in quite a bit of detail. That means asking you to sign ‘letters of authority’ asking those various, often numerous companies to speak to us on your behalf and tell us what we need to know. And you wouldn’t believe how difficult many of them make that process. Some are great, or at least fine. Others insist on ‘wet signatures’, which means sending a letter in the post, which will then get lost or when it arrives be added to their ’10-20 working-day’ turnaround backlogs – these are usually the firms which tell you when they call how concerned they are about the safety of their employees during Covid…Anyway, we’re usually the ones who end up looking inefficient, so will with many similarly-suffering colleagues, be backing any impetus for change and improvement.
“Worry for profession as young adviser numbers plummet”
There are around 31,000 advisers currently authorised by the FCA to give advice. Of these only around 6% are under 30 and 84% of all advisers are male. There are 209,000 solicitors, 7,000 young ones enter the profession each year and 52% of all solicitors are now female.
