Defining Broken Transfers: How should the advice sector handle insistent clients?

Summer series continues

Hannah Godfrey
clock • 13 min read

If all advisers avoid insistent transfer clients and deny them what they want, then there goes a theory that eventually their fate will end up in the hands of those more unscrupulous. So, how does the advice sector as a whole deal with these determined clients?

Insistent clients are big business in the world of defined benefit (DB) transfer advice. So big, in fact, some 9,534 insistent clients were transferred out of DB schemes between April 2015 and September 2018. That data from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) means insistent clients were involved in about one-in-eight (13%) of all those who transferred. What is more, these insistent client cases came from 620 firms - or 25% of all advice businesses that have advised on DB transfers since pension freedoms. That said, anecdotal evidence suggests facilitating insistent client transfers is becoming...

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