At Visit this page of sounding facetious, an unbiased financial adviser is a person who gives independent advice on financial matters. Actually, stating the rather obvious in this way 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 will not be influenced in any way by selling an individual company's products. Independence means that the client can expect the adviser to act completely impartially, entirely in the client's needs, and not because there is a recognised dependent relationship between the adviser and one particular supplier. The significance of this independence cannot be stressed enough. The adviser has to be licensed by and is regulated by the Financial Services Authority, and independence is something that is central to such recognition. The client's faith and rely upon the adviser stems largely from the latter's independence.
Financial
An unbiased financial adviser needs to have expert professional understanding of a huge range of financial loans and services. Since it has probably the most highly developed financial services industries in the world, the sheer selection of products on the British market means that knowledge and professionalism must be of the best order.
Because of the sheer selection of subjects with which an independent financial adviser must be familiar, you will find a correspondingly wide range of qualifications open to individual advisers. For example, the adviser might 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. Above all, however, the adviser knows that his is really a constantly changing market, with services and services emerging constantly. He or she can make it his or her business to stay 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 is as if the adviser had stepped into the client's shoes and was giving advice entirely from the client's perspective. In this way, the client could be assured that the advice is actually independent, objective and impartial advice that may 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 shows, each one of the three words encapsulates a simple and vital part of this professional's job. Each word describes the obligations that the adviser has towards each of his clients, so the clients, for his or her part, can rest absolutely assured that they receive genuinely independent, well-informed and expert financial advice that will aid their own needs.