The trouble with hiring a Barclays adviser

How three very different firms are providing opportunities for former Barclays advisers...

Barclays announced in January it would no longer offer customers financial advice at its branches, leaving up to 600 advisers looking for work.

Personal Touch Financial Services

PTFS is targeting former Barclays advisers and chief operating officer John Ruddick sees this as an area of growth for the IFA network side of the business.

“We look around for advisers who have demonstrated competence in terms of their advice and it fits in with our strategy of growing the IFA side of our business.

“In this case there are a large number of advisers who are obviously well-trained who will need support from a large organisation such as ourselves to help them through the changes with RDR.

“There is a specific challenge for those advisers in as much as they have been in an employed environment and now, in effect, they are going into business themselves.

“As we have so many mortgage advisers, we are going out there and encouraging them to refer investment and pension business to our IFAs. So it is almost as if we can support them in that move as there is the potential for a local referral system.

“They have the challenge, which any other IFA is facing at the moment, about how to move from a commission model to charging clients fees.”

Jones Associates

Director Ron Jones will soon be welcoming one former Barclays adviser to his firm, with a further two possibly joining soon.

"If they had just left Barclays and the company had carried on offering advice, then I am not sure there would have been significant value to us as a business.

"However, because Barclays is not prepared to offer an ongoing service, there is an opportunity. People who are disaffected can keep the same relationship and that gives the advisers a starting point.

“They are well-trained within the structure they worked in and are used to working to high individual standards. But the product base was smaller, so there is still a large training requirement – we have to train them to be an IFA really.

"There will also be a huge culture change. They are now going to be offering clients significant improvements in the standard of service they have been used to.

"Holistic financial planning wasn’t on their agenda. It was just a case of: ‘That is the product I want to sell them, what do I have to do to get it through the system?’

AWD Chase de Vere

AWD has been in discussions with former Barclays advisers and may take some on later this year. Patrick Connolly says:

“There are around 600 former Barclays advisers in total and the quality of them all is not up to what we would want, so the first thing for us is to get the right quality rather than quantity.

“However, their skill levels in terms of technical knowledge and qualifications is very good.

“What many of them will not have is an IFA background so that will be a challenge for us and them.

“Some of the advisers who come over will need a fair degree of hand holding and we are also looking at some bespoke training programmes for them so they can adjust from the direct to the IFA side.

“There are likely to be a wider range of advice options and we perhaps look more holistically than a direct or tied agent would do.

“Our research team would do a lot of the background analysis so that would help them in the transition as what we don’t want our advisers doing is spending all their time researching products.

"Their job is about financial planning and client relationships.”