Xentum Update.

Hi everyone.

I thought it would be useful to share a few updates and thoughts as we approach the end of the year.

Just over 15 years ago, Dominic founded Xentum…

Dominic founded the firm due to frustrations over the traditional way financial advice firms were looking after their clients.  We are lucky that nearly all of Xentum’s founding clients have seen the journey of Xentum and many of them we are now proud to call friends.

At that time, he also recruited a very pleasant lady, Claire Gould.

We are absolutely delighted to say that Claire has been with us for 15 years now and many of you will have come across Claire in your dealings with Xentum.

She is a great colleague and team-mate and Claire was the first person to interview me when I started at Xentum around 12 years ago, so we often share a laugh over that!

FCA Approval – going back to Directly Authorised

In my last update I shared that we are leaving Best Practice Network to go back to being Directly Authorised with the FCA.  This process is nearly through and we expect it to happen early in the New Year.

The main change from your perspective is that we will be able to create a better client experience and offer you a more intuitive outcome because of the freedom we will have outside the Network.

The FCA really promotes client experience but networks struggle keeping up with these changes due to their size and complexity.  We have been working hard behind the scenes to create a much more client friendly experience that allows us to offer more flexibility in how you access and receive information.

We can’t wait to share them with you in 2020.

Meetings and Reviews next year

In the New Year you will be receiving requests for meeting dates and reviews with your financial planner from our client service managers, Lisa Codling and Rabab Shah.

We would like to book these meetings in as soon as we can and also to make sure we allocate enough time and preparation for each meeting.

We would be grateful if you could help us achieve this approach by working with Lisa and Rabab to find appropriate dates and times.

Investment Committee

As part of our ongoing desire to improve and get better every day, we are also really excited to welcome an investment legend in Tim Hale to oversee our investment committee.

Tim is incredibly respected in the investment and financial planning market and is author of the book Smarter Investing.

I have been working hard with Tim and his team very closely around our investment process and due diligence of our recommended solutions this year and we are just about to finalise our new investment philosophy and process which will be rolled out during 2020.

A quick spoiler but a big emphasis is on reducing costs from the process where possible!

New Arrivals

We have recently had a couple of new arrivals as Lee (technical specialist) and his wife Anna welcomed baby Olive into the world.

In addition, Jonny (chartered financial planner) and his partner Kat also welcomed baby Jacob into the world last month and all are doing fine apart from the sleepless nights ahead!

Client Successes

As part of our internal team communication we try to share client wins with each other.  It makes us feel rewarded and also reminds us the impact we have.

Here are some of the recent ones – obviously anonymised:

“After raising a complaint on behalf of the XXXXX family with a well known wealth manager, we managed to get them a compensation payment and exit fees waived! I’d say that’s going above and beyond. Well done guys”

“Dear Adam, just wanted to let you know Laura has been very assiduous in helping me to understand my finances, for which I am grateful. She is doing a good job”

“I think it was a good bit of teamwork and forward planning.
If anything should happen to me or mum in the next year, at least there is a (printed off) email paper trail for XXXX to follow.
Kind regards and thanks again.”

“Xentum is more than a mere financial advisory firm, it is a life advisory firm”

“I am retiring immediately at 55 and don’t need to work anymore. We would have never been able to make that decision without your help”

If we have had a positive impact, we would love you to share with our team.  Its a real pleasure showing them what there hard work means to our clients.

Final thoughts

We understand that the political environment is quite scary at the moment as we approach Brexit and a General Election.  Whatever happens we will do what we always do; We will get together, revisit your financial plan and discuss the best way forward.

Financial Planning is a lifelong process – Carl Richards

Once again, thank you for your continued support, we really appreciate the great clients that we get to work with and we hope that you have an enjoyable festive period.

Adam Carolan

Managing Director