We receive regular feedback from our member companies, whether simply via the enquiries directed at us or the answers that they provide to our specific research questions or requests. This helps to focus and direct our activities to ensure that they are obtaining, wherever possible, support from us that is fully relevant and timely.
Recruitment
Within this, recruitment is a key area of importance to the vast majority of our members. From my discussions with them, they all seem to find it difficult to locate high quality advisers who will fit easily into the expatriate lifestyle. Recruitment companies are often too diversified and thus don’t really have the understanding or expertise with regards to the financial services industry. Even where they do, they tend not to have the required experience of the offshore world and generally want to be remunerated on appointment rather than, say, over a period of time based on results. The latter is definitely more favoured by IFA business owners.
We have been looking at various initiatives along the lines of partnerships or joint ventures in order to try and address this issue and, during the last month have progressed matters to the point where we expect to have a FEIFA-exclusive service available in the very near future. This will help our members take advantage of the short term opportunity that arises as top-performing advisers, who are disillusioned with the UK industry and/or are looking for alternatives ahead of RDR, consider moving further afield.
Finding competitive protection products
On the product side of things we are constantly looking to unearth companies that can add value and range to the offerings our IFAs can utilise with their clients. One area of difficulty highlighted by our membership revolves around access to a full range of protection products at competitive premiums. We have managed to address this problem with considerable success in the last few weeks and find ourselves in the final stages of due diligence with a specialist provider, which would solve this issue immediately. This should be “rolled out” within the next couple of weeks.
As mentioned above, one of the ways we help to retain product access for our members, and look to assist in developing new structures for different European markets, is via our in-house research and the market information collated from it. In the last month alone we have obtained, evaluated and provided market information for two major offshore life insurers, one of whom is about to launch a new product into a country for the first time before the end of this year. Greater product choice is usually of significant worth to our members.
As a further attempt to increase the services that our members can offer clients, we recently started to help Moneycorp fully promote its excellent service, which enables easy and cost-effective currency exchange for those transferring their UK pensions to QROPS (Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Schemes). This is particularly relevant as most expats in Europe have seen the purchasing power of their pensions fall by more than 20% at times over the last 12 months, due to currency movements. This service is thus highly beneficial to our members’ clients, and also to the members themselves as we have agreed a unique remuneration arrangement with Moneycorp.
Whilst we are, of course, always focused on building our IFA membership, it is very important we continue to provide valid, tangible benefits for our existing members. The last month has seen real progress in this regard.
