Client service is our top priority and we aim to a high standard of customer care to your clients. We believe that your clients have the right to a prompt and courteous service that enables them to achieve good outcomes. 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.

It is essential that we have your clients’ email address to enable us to communicate promptly with them and to enable us to deliver access to our client portal to them, YourCAM.

How to Make a Cash Transfer

If your clients 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 client’s bank, as opposed to that of a relative or associated company.

If your client needs to withdraw cash from your CAM portfolio, we ask that you provide us with as much notice as possible so we can manage the investments that we make efficiently for your clients. For example, we might choose not to reinvest a dividend if we know that your client is 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 your client within five business days of your client’s 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 your client via Swift Payment, BACS or CHAPS. For your clients’ 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 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. Please also note that if your client changes the bank account to which they wish funds to be transferred, we will need a copy of a bank statement or similar evidence before making any payments.

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 or your clients. 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.

Special Circumstances

Our regulators, the FCA, have spoken frequently in recent years about clients with characteristics of vulnerability. Without wishing to label anyone, we recognise that we can all have characteristics of vulnerability at some point in our lives.. This might arise because of a life event, such as a bereavement, or an experience of ill health suffered by our client or someone close to them. Financial pressures or difficulties with understanding financial matters can also lead to someone having characteristics of vulnerability. 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.

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 35 years we have never needed to make a claim. In addition, our business is robustly capitalised and exceeds the regulatory requirements multiple times.

In addition, new rules for protecting retail clients have been launched by the Payment 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 client’s money back into their 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.