Helping you achieve the PFS Gold Standard

Top advice
2m read
|
May 2019
Aaron Coates
Chief Product Officer

The Gold Standard is a voluntary code of good practice from the Pension Finance Society for safeguarded and defined benefit pension transfer advice, based around a set of 9 principles. Money Alive’s product team have worked with the PFS to offer our support for Advisers to meet these principles.

The nine principles

  1. Helping clients understand when advice is appropriate.
  2. Ensuring advice given supports the client's overall wellbeing in the context of their stated objectives.
  3. Ensuring client understanding and acceptance of all charges.
  4. Ensuring the most appropriate and updated technical skills are applied.
  5. Transparent management of Conflicts of Interest.
  6. Helping clients understanding the cost of transferring benefits.
  7. Avoiding unregulated investments and introducers.
  8. Transparency in advice processes and outcomes.
  9. Promoting the Consumer Guide to the Pension Transfer Gold Standard.

The triaging qualities of the Money Alive platform are already helping firms meet principle 1 ‘Helping clients understand when advice is appropriate’ but we are delighted to add a highly valuable new feature, ‘Journey outcomes’, that will help firms meet principle 8 too. All of these new features are available for use now and come with no additional charge.

Gold Standard Money Alive features

Journey outcomes - Each clients journey record created in the Money Alive platform now has the ability to be tagged with a journey outcome; ‘Did not proceed to advice’, ‘Recommended to stay’ and ‘Recommended to transfer’. The selected outcome will become part of the client record and downloadable reports.

Journey notes - You can now save a ‘post-it’ style note against a client journey report. It’s recommended to save a note at the same time as setting the outcome as this note will become part of the downloadable report.

Outcomes report - Once a Business only subscription feature, our client journey progress report has been updated to include the journey outcome and is now available across all plans. The PFS gold standard principle 8 requires ‘Transparency in advice processes and outcomes’. Our new outcomes feature, alongside the report it generates, makes outcomes record keeping straightforward. The data will also prove invaluable for your PII negotiations.

See also