At Learn here of sounding facetious, an unbiased financial adviser is a person who gives independent suggestions about financial matters. Actually, stating the rather obvious in this way put an important stress on the three vital components of the independent financial adviser's role.
Independent
The independence of the adviser is critical. When an unbiased financial adviser is consulted, it is very important know that he or she does not have any vested interest and can not be influenced in any way by selling an individual 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 since there is a recognised dependent relationship between your adviser and something particular supplier. The importance of this independence cannot be stressed enough. The adviser should be licensed by and is regulated by the Financial Services Authority, and independence is a thing that is central to such recognition. The client's faith and rely upon the adviser stems largely from the latter's independence.
Financial
An independent financial adviser will need expert professional knowledge of a huge selection of financial products and services. Since it has one of the highly developed financial services industries in the world, the sheer range of products on the British market implies that knowledge and professionalism must be of the best order.
Because of the sheer range of subjects with which an unbiased financial adviser needs to be familiar, you will find a correspondingly wide range of qualifications available to individual advisers. For example, 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. Above all, however, the adviser knows that his is a constantly changing market, with services and services emerging continuously. He or she can make it their business to stay completely up to date with these trends.
Adviser
As an adviser, the 3rd and vital component of the independent financial adviser's role harks back again to the first of his or her qualities, independence. The financial advice given must be "best advice" when recommending any service or product. That is to say, the advice must be the advice that's genuinely in the client's best interest. It really is as though the adviser had stepped in to 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 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 of the three words encapsulates a fundamental and vital section 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 they receive genuinely independent, well-informed and expert financial advice that will serve their own best interests.