Why we put our paraplanners in front of clients

Gregg Crawford, senior financial planner at Informed Financial Planning, explains why the paraplanner role at his firm will continue to evolve as the business develops.

As a senior financial planner with more than 12 years experience in the industry, I have become acutely aware of the important role paraplanners play in helping to deliver financial advice effectively.

Here at IFP, the inhouse paraplanning role is not new, in fact it has played an important part in the way we operate for the past seven years. Our focus has always been to provide the best client experience that we can and without such a strong support from the paraplanning and technical team, our proposition would not be as robust as it is today.

A key member of our team is Paul Bowater. Paul is part of our paraplanning team and uses his various strengths to help support my role as a financial planner. He compiles the research, creates a bespoke client report and communicates with the necessary providers and our admin team to collate and present any information to the client. His ability to keep up to date with industry changes, provider news and relate this to our clients through our service standards are a reflection of his training and experience to date.

Typically, we sit down together usually once or twice a week and discuss the client cases we are working on. We review the Factfind, discuss the main objectives of the client,  then Paul will go away and complete an analysis of the client’s current circumstances, objectives and provide recommendations for future action.

We then sit down again and go through the recommendation together before finalising the action plan for me to present to the client. This allows me to predominantly see clients and attend to client facing activities, knowing that their needs are being taken care of by a technically able team of individuals ‘behind the scenes’.

A key benefit of working with Paul and the rest of our paraplanning team is that, as advisers, we are able to train and manage them to our way of working. We work closely as a whole team and all adhere to the IFP business standards - these make sure that all clients receive consistent and high quality advice.

We have recently implemented our client service standards, which ensure that all our clients receive annual or six monthly review meetings in line with their chosen service level. There is no way that this could be manageable without a paraplanner as I would not have the time to see as many clients as I do now.