At the risk of sounding facetious, an independent financial adviser is somebody who gives independent advice on financial matters. In fact, stating the rather obvious in this manner put an important pressure on the three vital components of the independent financial adviser's role.
Independent
The independence of the adviser is crucial. When an independent financial adviser is consulted, it is important to know that she or he has no vested interest and can not be influenced at all by selling a single company's products. Independence means that the client can get the adviser to do something completely impartially, entirely in the client's best interests, and not because there is an established dependent relationship between the adviser and one particular supplier. The significance of this independence cannot be stressed enough. The adviser should be licensed by and is regulated by the Financial Services Authority, and independence is something that is central to such recognition. https://money.com and rely upon the adviser stems largely from the latter's independence.
Financial
An independent financial adviser needs to have expert professional knowledge of a huge range of financial products and services. Because it has probably the most highly developed financial services industries on earth, the sheer range of products available on the British market means that knowledge and professionalism must be of the highest order.
Due to the sheer range of subjects with which an unbiased financial adviser must be familiar, there is a correspondingly wide range of qualifications open to individual advisers. For instance, the adviser may have professional qualifications awarded by the Chartered Financial Analysts (CFA) Institute, the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII), the Institute of Financial Planning (IFP), the Personal Finance Society (PFS), the Pensions Management Institute (PMI, the Securities and Investment Institute (SII), or others. Most importantly, however, the adviser knows that his is really a constantly changing market, with new products and services emerging at all times. He or she can make it his or her business to remain completely abreast of these trends.
Adviser
As an adviser, the 3rd and vital component of the independent financial adviser's role harks back to the first of their qualities, independence. The financial advice given must be "best advice" when recommending any service or product. That is to say, the advice should be the advice that's genuinely in the client's best interest. It really is as though the adviser had stepped into the client's shoes and was giving advice entirely from the client's perspective. In this manner, the client could be assured that the advice is actually independent, objective and impartial advice that will fulfill the interests that your client himself or herself has identified.
Summary
It is surprising just how much meaning could be packed in to the three words that describe the role of the independent financial adviser. But as the above brief, thumb-nail sketchy has shown, each one of the three words encapsulates a fundamental and vital part of this professional's job. Each word describes the obligations that the adviser has towards each of his clients, so that the clients, for their part, can rest absolutely assured that they receive genuinely independent, well-informed and expert financial advice that will serve their own best interests.
