Fair Value Statement | Swift & Brining

About Us

This document is aimed at providing you with a brief overview of our firm and to introduce our services.

In this document, we intend to illustrate how we assess value and whether there is fair value between the total price of the service and the benefits and their quality that our clients receive.

Swift & Brining Financial Planning Limited are Independent Financial Planners offering bespoke financial planning solutions to individuals and businesses. Our range of services include Investments, Pensions, Life Insurance and Protection which are tailored for each individuals’ requirements.

Covering Yorkshire and Humberside, we pride ourselves on high levels of customer service, building long lasting relationships and offering tailored solutions to new and existing clients, helping you achieve your financial aspirations and therefore giving you peace of mind.

Mark is a highly enthusiastic and committed financial adviser with over 23 years’ experience in financial services.

Steve has over 28 years’ experience in the financial services industry, offering tailor made solutions to achieve a clients individual and specific financial planning requirements.

Our service proposition has been designed to meet the needs and objectives of our clients and to ensure fair value is received by engaging with our service.

Financial Advisers are not all the same and the amount of value they add to your financial situation varies considerably. We offer advice on an "Independent" basis. This means that we provide unbiased, unrestricted advice based on a comprehensive and fair analysis of the relevant market, giving due consideration to the full range of retail investment, pension and life products available in the marketplace which may be suitable for you.

We are completely committed to providing our clients with totally independent and unbiased financial advice for life. In practice, this means transparent charges, tax efficient fee-based solutions, and above all, never allowing provider incentive to cloud our judgement during the advice process.

We are not tied to any bank, investment house or insurance company. We are independently owned with no insurance company sharing any stake in our company, by retaining this purity we can always act in our client's best interests.

Best Practice Member Firm Business

Best Practice provide an institutional regulatory supervision and compliance framework service which provides us with a high level of regulatory assurance and leading-edge client management systems.

This high quality and financially sound organisation ultimately provide us with a high level of assurance and comfort around the regulatory framework of the proposition and services we deliver to you, our clients.

By leveraging the quality and services of an organisation like Benchmark, a Schroders plc group company, we have comfort that we will remain at the leading edge of our profession, ensuring we maintain a “Best Practice” approach to serving our clients. Many of the benefits we derive, we see as having direct value add relevance for our clients, including:

The provision of an independent complaints handling process for all of our clients,
enhanced professional indemnity insurance
integrated client technology systems, including the Wealth Platform
independent compliance supervision of our advisers and the suitability of our client advice.

The Value of our Service

Our Proposition – Initial Advice (Onboarding)

Initial Advice

Discovery Meeting
Full get you know you meeting
Establish your goals and objectives / needs and wants
Establish your priorities
Establish your attitude to risk and capacity for loss
Analysis of existing planning
Research of potential solutions
Construct a holistic financial plan
Meet to discuss the financial plan and recommendations
Agree implementation

Annual Review Service

For us and our clients, this is an integral part of the financial planning journey and our annual ongoing advisory service. It gives us an opportunity to sit down with you and your family, to reflect on the past year and to look forward and consider what might be on the horizon for you in the coming years. To give you reassurance and peace of mind about how your investments are tracking against your goals and to review our plans in the context of any changing circumstances in your life, new goals, or changes in your objectives.

We consider the outlook for markets and the economic landscape and changing tax regulations which might impact on your current plans. We make sure everything we are doing remains suitable and is aimed at helping you and your family to achieve your goals

An opportunity to think about the coming years, plans for your family, begin to consider key life stages and events and how we might need to adapt our plans for them.

Ensures your current position is still appropriate for you

Cash flow modelling in FAD

Helps us to show you visually how your plan has been set up to meet your objectives.

The cash flow forecasting provides a visual illustration of how a client’s investments and wealth will move over time in relation to the financial plans that we formulate to meet their goals. This gives clients considerable comfort knowing that there is some mathematical rigour to our advice and how it will help them to meet their goals.

Family Protection Planning

It may be an uncomfortable subject, but we all need to plan for the unforeseen in life and how this would impact ourselves and our family. We can help you to consider different scenarios which could occur and identify if there are any shortfalls in your protection planning. We can explain what options you have to address these shortfalls and how they would ensure you and your family are able to maintain your lifestyle and still meet your longer-term financial goals, in the event of ill health or death.

Adviser access to professional tools and paraplanning resources/staff to conduct analysis and research to find the best/most suitable product. Use of trusts to provide ease of access, control etc.

Holistic Financial Planning

It is not just about monetary goals; this is about life and family and a consultative approach. This enables us to help clients to think about things they may not have considered and how plans can work together to create a cohesive timeline of advice.

IHT and Estate Planning

We work with your other professionals who have a deep knowledge and understanding of HMRC tax rules in relation to clients and their estate’s assets. We can help to understand the value of future liabilities and design and implement strategies to reduce this burden, often saving clients thousands of pounds in potential tax charges. This provides real value and peace of mind that your loved ones will be looked after when they are gone.

Retirement Planning

A key life phase. This is an area of planning which deserves significant time in reviewing for our clients each year. Often in the background, checking on progress of plans and investments you have made to fund your life in retirement. Adapting to market swings and modelling various impact scenarios. Retirement planning is one of the most valuable services we provide our clients.

Tax Efficiency

Making sure we consider tax reliefs and allowances, enables clients to maximise their after-tax wealth. If you don’t take advantage of annual tax reliefs, then you could quite literally be paying more tax than you need to. We can evidence the amount you have potentially saved through our planning.

Market and Product Research and Analysis

To recommend the most suitable solutions for our clients, we use professional tools to conduct research and analysis of provider and product solutions. This ensures we can make recommendations to best meet your needs and goals.

Corporate Services

We offer Corporate Pension services and Employee benefits.

This service offers tax efficiency, tangible cost savings, relevant life cover etc.

Non-advisory Services – Other services

Life Goals Planning

To help clients consider their short / medium / long term goals in life and provide financial solutions to help them in their plans to achieve these goals.

Financial Coaching

Financial Coaching can add value at various times throughout the financial planning journey and help you to make considered financial decisions.
Amounts to invest to meet your goals
How and when to release capital or take income
Reassurance in volatile market conditions
Understand how markets work and the journey you can expect
Understanding legislation and tax changes

Financial coaching – professional sense check – behavioural guidance - we help to take the emotion out of financial decision making and helping clients avoid falling into common mistakes.

Education Planning

Many clients want to support their children through university and we can help you put in place a financial plan to meet these costs in full or in part. This will provide you with the knowledge and peace of mind that this very important goal is in hand and will be reviewed year on year to make sure you are on track.

Market Briefings and Investment Updates

On annual review meetings, we discuss any legislation changes and tax changes along with investment updates.
Contacts with clients on an ad hoc basis should there be significant market changes.

Maintaining professional competency – Annual CPD

As a Financial Planner, each year we evidence the learning activities we have completed to maintain competence in our role and improve our knowledge This allows us to continue providing suitable and up to date advice to our clients, year on year.

Firm’s Investment Proposition

Philosophy and Investment Research Methodology

We believe passionately in passive investment management, because as research shows, you cannot second guess the market conditions. Whilst active investment could generate more capital growth over the long term, you could lose out on investment returns while being out of the market.

We adopt a blend of active and passive investment management strategies in our client solutions because this service is offered from providers within risk targeted multi-asset funds.

We use various benchmarks as a measure of market performance, these are offered by Trustnet and providers for the appropriate specific funds.

Our investment proposition is researched to provide the most suitable investment solutions to cater for your needs.

This ultimately gives our clients great comfort that their investments are being managed by investment professionals and their financial plans are being looked after by qualified financial planning professionals. This is the value that a relationship with our firm provides. It’s what our clients pay for.

Rebalancing

Auto-rebalancing of your portfolio on a regular basis, to reset your investments back to your agreed initial investment mix. We will also proactively consider the tax consequences of these actions and will ensure we are taking advantage of any tax reliefs or allowances that you are entitled to.

This is a proactive investment management service which helps to keep your investments on track to meet your goals and saves you money through utilisation of your annual capital gains tax allowances.

Helps to ensure your investments and selection of funds / asset classes remain aligned to your chosen attitude to risk and capacity for loss.

Helps to reset your investments on a regular basis back to your strategic investment plans, by adjusting dynamically for swings in markets.

Technology

One of the reasons we chose to work with Benchmark, was their technology. Something they have won numerous awards for. Ultimately backed by Schroders, we have every confidence that the security of our client’s information within Benchmark’s client management technology systems, is in very safe hands. This decision is something we know our clients expect us to get right. It’s incredibly important to them and a reason they feel safe working with us.

Your Staff / Adviser Training and Development Programmes

Advisers maintain permissions by completion of relevant exams, role plays and ongoing assessments. Along with attending providers seminars, webinars and online technical reading. This ensures the clients receive up to date information and advice from the adviser.

CPD programmes – maintaining professional knowledge, regulatory and tax change / updates / implications to client solutions.

General Value Statements - Working with your Firm / a Financial Adviser – Tangible and Intangible Benefits

Working with a professional financial planner provides expertise and peace of mind

We build multi decade trust-based relationships with our clients. We get to know what really matters most to them and their families. What they are trying to achieve in life and help them to achieve it.

Our relationships are often the longest standing relationships our clients have. They lean on us for so much more than the financial plans we cultivate and manage for them. This doesn’t happen without trust.

Client s receive annual statements direct from the provider. We will contact clients should there be any significant changes within the investment funds or performance, along with our annual review (depending on our agreed client service level).

Summary

At Swift & Brining Financial Planning Limited we believe that the only way to formulate the right strategy for our clients is to take a totally holistic approach. We take into account our client’s attitude to investment risk and then create a portfolio to match the client’s needs.

A complete investment solution should encompass many products which are interlinked. We are resolute in our approach and seek to utilise tax breaks in order to maximise profit for all of our clients.

Our holistic approach includes reviewing the following areas of advice:

Protection

The myriad of protection products available on the UK market can be daunting to say the least. You may just require a simple Mortgage Protection Plan to repay your Mortgage on death, or you may require your income protected in case you were unable to work through sickness or accident.

Even though protection products can appear simple on the surface, setting up a plan correctly is extremely important. Rather than search the entire market for the 'cheapest' premium available, we will take all factors into consideration and ensure that your policy has the best terms available for your own circumstances and is set up in absolutely the right way.

When we undertake a protection review it is astonishing to us that many existing contracts are not set up under the appropriate trust. As part of the overall financial planning process, we can advise clients on aspects of trust planning and can place most existing cover into the correct trust without having to take out a new policy.

Pensions

Rather than just asking our clients the question "How much would you need to retire on and at what age", we prefer to ask our clients how they see their own retirement. It does lead to some colourful answers!!! However, we believe it is an important step in the planning process to visualise their own retirement.

Since April 2006, pension legislation has seen some radical changes, the bulk of which, we believe are extremely positive and give people a real incentive to save for their futures. Pensions have come a long way from the dark days of commission riddled savings plans, which were the subject of many mis-sold cases in the 80's and 90's. Pensions today, are low charge, flexible and offer superb fund management as well as being tax efficient for a client.

As part of our planning process, we would seek to use all of the available tax relief we can when formulating our client’s retirement plans. This, coupled with the option of self-investing and independent fund selection, puts our clients on the right road to achieve their goals.

Investments

As part of any financial plan, we all need an emergency fund, generally we would aim to have at least six months expenses available.

In addition to an emergency fund, we view savings a short to medium-term investment of say less than five years. They are also a low-risk home for your savings and can help reduce your overall risk if you hold other asset classes such as equity and property. You will have to bear in mind that, over the longer term, your money may lose its value because of inflation.

We are great believers in utilising all available allowances and the National Savings range presents yet another opportunity for individuals to maximise net returns and provide a guaranteed hedge against inflation. As part of an overall planning process blending tax efficient deposit-based investments should always be considered.

Considering all areas included in the assessment of value, we believe the service provided is demonstrating value overall and our service proposition along with this value statement has been approved by our network, Best Practice Ltd

Important information: Best Practice IFA Group Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, registration number 223112. Registered in England and Wales No 04490633. Evolution Wealth Network Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, registration number 591218. Registered in England and Wales No 08229133. Registered office: Broadlands Business Campus, Langhurst Wood Road, Horsham, West Sussex, England, RH12 4QP.