Here’s the flip side. Should a business not have the right to choose whom it serves? If you as a client, or more likely potential client, rub us up the wrong way, are a declared anti-vaxxer or support the barges, can we not, as a business, say ‘Be Gone’? And should that be any different for a very large company than a small one? For better or worse, we’ve never been approached by someone who might be deemed a ‘Politically Exposed Person’, but we theoretically have to abide by the same rules as all other financial businesses and hold a handbook ready for consultation should one arrive on our doorstep. There are, let’s face it, plenty of other advisers, and plenty of other banks out there. A number of the latter have pretty blatantly not been that fussy about whom they take on as customers in the past and been fined accordingly. This is, of course of a different nature; but still a corner of the same, multi-sided coin.
“Record year for annuity sales driven by advisers”
I was asked this week whether annuities are now ‘a good investment’. They’ve been recommended very rarely in recent years, since ‘pension freedoms’ allowed pretty much unlimited drawdown on pension funds and anything left to be passed on to beneficiaries free of Inheritance Tax.