Raising the bar
The other driving force behind Speed’s quest for excellence is the lack of professionalism she encountered from local advice firms when she first moved from the UK to Spain in 2005.
Starting out as an adviser and trainer with startup Ardtalla, Speed moved to VFS after a year. In 2009, she joined Siddalls, which was then owned by IFG Group.
Within weeks of her joining, Siddalls was acquired by DeVere, where Speed worked as an area manager for seven months.
Describing the expat advice industry at the time as “very cut-throat”, Speed says she was forced to set up her own firm, having decided she did not want to work for another company and “see how badly they treated both me and the clients”.
“When I moved to Spain, it was a culture shock. Like a lot of expats, I came over in English mode and realised the industry is very different to what I was used to in the UK.
“There were unregulated firms only interested in initial commissions and not offering any aftercare to clients or servicing the clients. There’s been a culture of ‘pull the trigger’ and then disappearing.
“The kind of environment I found myself in was completely different to when I came into the industry. I spent nine years at Nationwide, which was and still is a very ethical business,” she says.
Thankfully, things have largely moved on since then, says Speed, with many of the unprofessional players that previously dominated Spain’s financial services having now left the market.
Dodgy firms
However, there are still some high-profile firms she feels “make a mockery of the industry”, due to the practice of bringing over unqualified staff from the UK to work as ‘financial advisers’ in Spain.
Last September, during a panel debate at the International Adviser Future Advisory Forum Europe, Speed compared Europe to “working in the wild west”, after witnessing clients receive poor advice from inadequately qualified advisers.
In the UK, unlike Europe, financial advisers must be qualified to a Level 4 (Diploma) to practice following the introduction of the retail distribution review (RDR) in 2013.
“The firms bring people over that have had other occupations in the UK. They give them a one-week training course and then send them out here, or to other countries, calling them financial advisers. It makes a mockery of the industry because we all get tarred with the same brush,” says Speed.
After careful consideration, Speed chose to set up her business as part of the Nexus IFA network, owned and operated by Gibraltar-headquartered The Blacktower Group.
“When I started the business, I wanted to demonstrate to clients that we have UK-style regulation. The Financial Services Commission in Gibraltar have regulation in place similar to the UK.”
Interestingly, the partnership led to Speed making the Nexus network the subject of her Master’s dissertation.
