Our client service is our top priority, and we aim to deliver good outcomes to all of our customers.

Our client service is our top priority, and we aim to deliver good outcomes to all of our customers.

We believe that you have the right to receive a prompt, fair and courteous service. We set ourselves the highest standards of integrity, accuracy, and competence, and have high expectations of our ability to provide advice and services to you. These standards are maintained by our staff, who have excellent levels of skills and experience, and are supported by an ongoing programme of training and development.  Our strong, personal, client driven culture is led by the Board and extends to every member of the team who will support you throughout your journey with CAM. Your objectives are at the heart of what we do for you and we want you to be empowered to make strong and effective decisions, knowing that our service can be relied upon to help you achieve your financial and life objectives

We understand that our clients can have diverse and complex needs. If you have a condition that we need to be aware of or are experiencing a life event that may change your circumstances, please reach out to us so we can ensure that we offer you the appropriate support. Whether you have started to experience hearing loss, have been diagnosed with a serious illness or have suffered a bereavement or other life event, we have developed a wide range of skills and tools to help you. Please be assured that all information is confidential, and we would never share this with any third party without your full permission. We will adapt the way we work together to ensure you still achieve your life and financial goals.

To strengthen our commitment to deliver good outcomes to you, we’ve set out the following pledges:

1. Products and Services: we will offer advice and deliver any of our services to you based upon your specific needs and circumstances, and we adapt this advice and service as your needs change over time. We will maintain high ongoing standards of advice, which are continually monitored. Our services are robustly structured and supported by an experienced, professional team.

   a.     We will prioritise the needs of our clients in developing any new services and manage any conflict of interest appropriately.

   b.     We always adhere our regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority’s (or ‘FCA’) rules on Best Execution. This means that you can be confident that we will achieve a good price when we execute any trade for you.

2. Price and Value: we commit to offering a transparent pricing structure to you. We will explain fully how our service supports your needs, not just in terms of the absolute cost but in the context of the value you receive from our advice and other services. We want you to understand what the cost of our services will be and what benefits this will provide to you. If your needs change, we will work with you to adapt our service to your new circumstances.

3. Understanding: we will always fully explain our service to you and ensure that all communications to you are in clear, plain English, and avoid the use of jargon and acronyms. We are always willing to help with any questions that you may have. All information that we provide will be designed to ensure that you fully understand how we are working with you. Good communication is at the heart of everything we do, and we constantly strive to improve. We want you to make effective, timely and fully informed decisions.

4. Support: your relationship with CAM will continually change and evolve. Whatever your needs are at any point in time, we will be here to ensure that our support for you is relevant and appropriate. Our service will be personal to your specific circumstances and our support will be tailored to you.

Our Client Experience Manager, Tracy Coghill, is always available to discuss any aspect of our service with you, should you prefer not to raise this with your usual CAM team members.

We’ve set out below some more specific commitments regarding how we will work with you.

Contact and Communication

We will provide you with the names and individual contact details of the people who deal with your portfolio on a day-to-day basis. If you need any help, this team of people is always available for you. We ask you to pick up the phone or send an email to us whenever you feel we can help; no question is too small or too silly to answer.

We will deal with all incoming telephone calls, emails and letters promptly and courteously. We will respond to you as quickly as possible and, if we can’t fully answer your question or action your request straight away, we will explain to you how soon we will be able to help and what, if any, other information we may need from you.

If you have particular needs regarding communications, for example you have some loss of hearing or sight difficulties, please just let us know. We will ensure that we provide the right support so you can fully understand all the information that we provide and we can tailor our communications accordingly.

We are happy for you to request that you include a third party when we communicate with you, such as a family member or trusted adviser. We will ask you to confirm your instructions in writing, but you can, of course, invite a friend to attend meetings with you informally too.

We expect to be in regular contact with you and to meet you in person, regularly. If circumstances don’t permit this to happen, we will arrange video meetings with you via Teams or Zoom. We will record meetings and telephone conversations that we have with you to ensure we can check any instructions or specific wishes you may have mentioned.

Finally, we want to provide the right support to you, throughout your relationship with us. If you have suffered a life event, such as a bereavement, been diagnosed with a health condition or have money worries, please do tell us. Our staff are well trained to support you and we can help to adjust your plans accordingly, so you are able to achieve good outcomes.

How to Make a Cash Transfer

If you wish to transfer money to CAM at any stage, please reach out to your usual CAM team for assistance. As a general rule, we can only accept payments that come from an account that matches the name on the destination portfolio; so we need monies to come directly from your bank, as opposed to that of a relative or associated company.

If you need to withdraw cash from your CAM portfolio, please do provide us with as much notice as possible to ensure that we can manage the investments that we make efficiently for you. For example, we might choose not to reinvest a dividend if we know that you are likely to be withdrawing funds next week. We do appreciate that urgent situations arise and in these circumstances, we will do our utmost to have cash available to you within five business days or your request. However, please be aware that certain investments are less liquid, and market conditions may also restrict our ability to sell holdings quickly.

We can transfer funds to you via Swift Payment, BACS or CHAPS. For your security, all transfers of £250,000 or over will be made by CHAPS. Our custodians do levy a small charge for this service, currently £25. As with transfers into CAM, money laundering regulations mean that we can generally only make transfers to an account in the same name as the CAM portfolio from which the funds are sourced.

Security - Avoiding Fraud and Scams

We have put in place robust procedures to tackle the growing issues with financial scams and fraud. Please bear with us if we need to verify your identity or make certain checks before we can assist you; we are working to keep your assets and information safe at all times. We treat your personal data with sensitivity and meet the highest possible standards of confidentiality. We will only share information with third parties where the law or regulations require this, or if you give us your express permission to do so. Please see our privacy policy for further details.

When you access information via our client portal, we will do our best to ensure that it is up to date and that we minimise interruption from maintenance that means information is not available to you. Please help us to keep your information secure by using complex passwords and holding these securely.

If you believe that you have fallen victim to any type of identity fraud or hacking, for example, someone has managed to hack your email or is impersonating your email address, please let us know immediately. We have an excellent system of additional security measures for your CAM Account that we can put in place to help you. We have summarised some useful information and provided a link to the FCA Scamsmart website here.

Feedback and Redress

We are committed to working with our clients to achieve your highest expectations of our service. Naturally, your views on what we do well and how we can improve are important to us; we continually challenge ourselves to perform better. If you’ve had a good experience or if there are areas where you think we could improve, please get in touch with our Client Experience Manager, Tracy Coghill (0207 324 2941 or tracy.coghill@city-asset.co.uk). You can talk to Tracy in strict confidence if you would prefer or ask Tracy to follow up with your usual CAM team.

We want to acknowledge that, from time to time, you may be unhappy about a particular aspect of the services that we deliver to you. Again, Tracy is happy to discuss this with you but, if you want to make a formal complaint, we have provided full details of how to do this here. We want to assure you that we will deal promptly and fairly with any complaint.

Dealing with Third Parties

From time to time, we may deal with third parties as part of delivering our services to you. Our professional staff have built excellent relationships with the institutions that we deal with frequently. Ensuring that we build good partnerships and leverage these to provide a strong service to you is very much part of our day to day business. Whether it is transferring assets in from an ISA held with a retail bank, speaking to a SIPP provider about income requirements or working with an adviser outside CAM, we will always act in good time with skill and care, doing our best to achieve good outcomes for you. In these situations, we are not in control of how quickly matters can be resolved but we will give you regular updates on our progress and let you know if there is any extra information that we need. Please feel free to contact us at any stage of the process to ask questions.

Risk

Investing involves some risk to your assets. How much risk is appropriate for you will be crucial in our ongoing discussions with you. We have set out more detail about the risks that investments may involve here.

It is very important to us that you understand the risk of our service. At any point of your journey with CAM, we urge you to speak to a member of your CAM team to discuss your portfolio if you are at all concerned. We can’t control market movements or political events, but we can be here to reassure and explain.

Special Circumstances

Our regulator, the FCA, has spoken frequently in recent years about clients with characteristics of vulnerability. We recognise that we can all have experiences that mean that we may have characteristics of vulnerability at some point in our lives. Supporting clients who are experiencing health or financial worries or undergoing a stressful time with children, or a difficult divorce is very much part of our service. We promise to deal with any situation helpfully, sensitively, and confidentially. We are proud of the experience that members of our staff have in helping clients in difficult times and we know that we can use these skills to help you, if and when necessary. The members of your CAM team will be sensitive to your emotional needs; you can always ask us to adapt our behaviour to help you, for example by involving a loved one in correspondence or leaving it to you to let us know when you feel able to receive a telephone call from us. We operate to the highest standards of confidentiality, and you can be assured that we will not share details about what is happening, unless we must do so because of a law or regulatory rule. When you are battling with a tough situation, please trust us to support you.

To comply with our regulatory obligations, we are required to follow certain requirements relating to identifying and reporting on clients with characteristics of vulnerability. Whilst we always handle issues discretely, we may need to note on our systems that certain clients have been classified as ‘Vulnerable’ to meet these regulatory requirements. This helps ensure that such clients are treated appropriately by the CAM team when necessary.

Security of Assets

The safeguarding of your money and assets is an important priority for us and for our regulator, the FCA. The FCA impose very high standards of conduct upon us and the entire financial service industry and we adhere to the rules that they impose upon us at all times. We work closely with our trusted custodian and administrator, Platform Securities LLP (‘PSL’) to ensure that we are fully compliant with the stringent legal and regulatory rules regarding your portfolio. You can request a valuation at any time and you can always call us to check on our progress with transferring assets or raising cash for you. Your assets are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Further details of the protection that you are entitled to are available here.

In addition, new rules for protecting retail clients have been launched by the Payments Systems Regulator (PSR). The PSR will now refund eligible claims up to a maximum of £85,000 where the transactions are:

• Faster Payments or CHAPS payments made in the UK

• From a personal bank account, micro-enterprise or, in some cases, charities.

A claim must be raised within 13 months of the final payment made to a fraudster as part of the same scam.

The PSR won’t assess claims under these rules where the payments:

• Are made by cheque, cash, card or made outside the UK

• Are to your own account held at another bank

• Were for unlawful purposes, for example if you were purchasing something illegal

• Are part of a civil dispute.

If your claim is successful, the PSR will put your money back into your account within 5 working days. In some cases, it may take up to 35 working days to receive a decision. This might happen if the PSR needs to ask for more information.

We welcome this new protection, but do warn our clients to be very careful when transferring funds to any third party.