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 may have diverse and complex needs. If you have a condition that we may 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 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 your need, 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 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.

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 want to be in regular contact with you and meet with you in person wherever possible. 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, whatever situation you find yourself in. 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 you. 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 vulnerable clients. Without wishing to label anyone, we recognise that we can all be vulnerable 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 Vulnerable Clients. 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 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 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.