Professional Clients

You are solely responsible for the use that you make of information found on this website. You must ensure that you communicate with retail clients in accordance with the current regulations around suitability, and in accordance with COBS.

The FCA’s SDR and the Consumer Duty have introduced many new obligations that financial advisers, discretionary investment managers and fund managers need to navigate effectively. This is a copy of the FCA’s Dear CEO letter sent to wealth managers and stockbrokers in the closing stages of 2023. From this you can see that the FCA are expecting us all to take the Consumer Duty and SDR very seriously indeed.

We support the provisions contained in SDR. We are a respondent to the SDR consultation. It is clear that many advisers and investment managers do not fully appreciate the risks that greenwashing may present to their businesses.

We Can Help You

We’ve been doing this for almost 30 years.

We understand the challenges advisers face in advising clients on ethical, sustainable, responsible, and impact investing.

We know greenwashing and how to uncover it even when companies cleverly hide it by using powerful SEO techniques and marketing.

Help for Financial Advisers

We can help you design processes that will enable the right conversations to be had on subjects that you may not be comfortable broaching with clients.

We can train your advisers on ethics and how ethics can be integrated into their financial planning work with clients.

We can provide training on ethical, sustainable and impact investing, how they differ and how an understanding of each can help to unlock potential for better and more robust personal recommendations.

For advisers that don’t already have a sustainable and impact investment proposition we can help design one. Or you can have access to Ayres Punchard’s Key to the Future Model Portfolio Service, which will provide you with a robust and reliable ESG-focused, sustainable, impact-driven investment solution for your clients.

Help for Fund Managers and Investment Committees

Greenwashing is a big problem and often it is not recognised in time. This means decisions to divest are taken too late, resulting in avoidable loss.

We are very conversant with this aspect of portfolio management and carry out in-depth research into our own portfolio to uncover issues with investee companies, which are sometimes not the sustainable impactful saints that the fund managers believe them to be.

Armed with evidence and material arguments, we can help fund managers to have more effective engagements. In extreme cases we can help construct arguments for divestment that will help funds reduce the risk they could be exposed to from blatant greenwashing.