Client service is our top priority and we aim to deliver good outcomes to all of our customers. We believe that your clients have the right to 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 services to you and your clients. 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 and your clients throughout your journey with CAM.

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

1. Products and Services: We will deliver high quality services to your clients based upon their specific needs and circumstances, as advised by you. Our services are robustly structured and supported by an experienced, professional team. We will prioritise the needs of your clients in developing any new services and manage any conflict of interest appropriately. We always adhere to the FCA’s rules on Best Execution.

2. Price and Value: We commit to offering a transparent pricing structure to you. We will explain fully how our service supports you and your clients’ needs, not just in terms of the absolute cost but in the context of the value that our services can add. We want you to understand what the cost of our services will be and what benefits this will provide.

3. Understanding: We will always fully explain our services to you and your clients 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 and your clients fully understand how we are working with you. Good communication is at the heart of everything we do, and we constantly strive to improve.

4. Support: Whatever the needs of your clients 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 clients’ specific needs and our support will be tailored to your business.

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 clients’ portfolios on a day-to-day basis. If you need any help, this team of people are always available for you. We want you to pick up the phone or send an email to us whenever you feel we can help.

We will deal with all incoming telephone calls, emails and letters promptly and courteously. We will always aim to 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.

We use the Docusign system for sending out agreements via email to you and your clients. We are generally happy to accept electronic copies of all documentation, with some necessary exceptions (eg: death certificates). We want to make administration as easy as possible for you and your clients and all of our forms and documents are designed to be clear and easy to understand. We also provide access to our client portal where you and your clients can securely access a wide range of information, including valuations.

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 clients’ assets and information safe at all times. We will only share information regarding your clients with third parties where law or regulations require us to do so, or if you give  us your express permission. 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 the number of times that system maintenance means that information is not available to you. Please help us to keep your information secure by using complex passwords and holding these securely.

 If you do believe that you or any of your clients have fallen victim to any type of identity fraud or hacking, for example, someone has managed to hack your email or is impersonating the email address of one of your clients, do please let us know immediately. We have an excellent system of additional security measures 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 you to achieve your highest expectations of our services. Naturally, your views on what we do well and how we can improve are important to us; we want to 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 do 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 service that we deliver to you. Again, Tracy is happy to discuss this with you. We want to assure you that we will deal promptly and fairly with any complaint and make sure that, if it is appropriate to make redress or pay compensation, we will follow through with this quickly and efficiently.

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 many of the institutions that we deal with frequently and ensuring that we build good partnerships is very much part of our day-to-day business. Whether it is, for example, transferring in ISA assets , speaking to a SIPP provider or talking to an accountant, we will always act in good time with skill and care, doing our best to achieve good outcomes for you and your clients. In these situations, we are not always 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.

Vulnerable Clients

Our regulators, the FCA, have spoken frequently in recent years about vulnerable clients. Without wishing to label anyone, we recognise that we can all be vulnerable at some point in our lives. 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 your clients. 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 rule.

To comply with our regulatory obligations, we are obliged to follow certain requirements relating to identifying and reporting on Vulnerable Clients. Whilst we always handle issues discreetly, we may need to note on our systems that certain clients have been classified as Vulnerable to meet these regulatory requirements.

We have in place a detailed policy regarding Vulnerable Clients. All staff receive training quarterly and are required to be familiar with our internal Guide to Helping Vulnerable Clients. As part of our DDQ process, we routinely ask all advisers to share information with us regarding the needs of their Vulnerable Clients generally and, if a specific vulnerability is identified, we expect an adviser to contact us to discuss how best to support that client. This arrangement is recorded on our client records to ensure that the needs of the individual are met by any member of the CAM team. However, we would not expect to share this information with any third party, unless required to do so by law or regulation.

If you would like any more information regarding this area, please contact our Client Experience Manager, Tracy Coghill (tracy.coghill@city-asset.co.uk).

Security of Client Assets

The safeguarding of your clients’ money and assets is our top priority. 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 clients’ portfolios. 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. Your clients’ assets are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Further details of the protection that they are entitled to are available here.

We also hold comprehensive PI coverage and are proud that in over 30 years we have never needed to make a claim. In addition, our business is robustly capitalised and exceeds the regulatory requirements multiple times.