The Northern Home Counties Branch held its first meeting in 2014 at the Sunley Conference Centre based at the University of Northampton, reports branch chairman Dr Lien Luu CFP^CM.

The decision to move the venue from Milton Keynes was partly motivated by the desire to provide opportunities for a significant number of students studying financial planning and investments at the University to join IFP members in attending the meetings.

The first meeting was a great success, with more than 75 members and students gathered to hear three brilliant speakers: Julie Lord FIFP CFP^CM, Tim Hale and Andrew Reeves FIFP CFP^CM.

Julie's lively interactive discussion gave us an excellent understanding of the nature of client care. Besides having a nice, clean office and appearing professional, client care means that we put the client at the heart of what we do. This can be as simple as answering the phone within 3 rings with a smiley voice when they call, remember their preferences for coffee or tea, and asking them meaningful questions (e.g. 'what do you want to do with your life? How do you want to be remembered? What do you want to be written on your tombstone?'). The purpose of the discovery meeting is for clients to tell planners about what is important to them and what are their concerns. It is important that we LISTEN, so that we can establish intimacy, credibility and reliability, which are essential ingredients of trust.



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Tim's talk convinced us as to why passive investments make sense. As humans, we make terrible investors and often behave irrationally (buy high, sell low). He has some very simple rules for us to follow: diversify globally, diversify by asset type, have a suitable bond and equity split, do not chase markets, use short-dated high quality bonds, keep costs low and rebalance the original structure. The sensible structure is to adopt 'a water and whisky approach' - have some investments in defensive assets and some in return engine assets (developed market equity, emerging markets, small/value equities). Tim reminded us that our primary role as planners is to provide valuable ongoing wealth advice, not fund management service!



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Andrew delighted the audience with his mastery of technologies and his demonstration of how a wide range of free and useful applications can be used in our business, including storage applications (Dropbox, Google Drive), email management (Sanebox, Yesware), management of work-flow (Trello), and getting paid applications (GoCardless, Sumup).



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As well as IFP members attending the students also greatly enjoyed themselves. They were also extremely grateful to members for helping them with their assignments, which require them to design a pension planning guide and a website to promote protection products, both of which are sponsored by leading firms.