Annual reviews ‘not serving clients’

Clive Fernandes is director of Sevaka, which provides AI support for financial advisers. He also established advice firm National Capital.

He said annual reviews had never been best for clients. “The proof of that is the fact that clients haven’t been responding to the call from advisers to get financial advice.

“There has to be another reason other than clients don’t care about their own financial lives. I believe the reason is that we just don’t have the system set up correctly to give clients what they actually need. Right now advice is given on the adviser’s timeline rather than the client’s timeline. Just because a client happened to speak to me for the first time on December 24th, doesn’t mean every year the client’s available on December 24th.”

He said a better option was to try to speak to clients at the points they needed advice.