Having a local shop front, with people authorised locally, is key to providing cross-border advice, says Paul Beard, founder and executive chairman at Alexander Beard.
He says the expat market is rife with unregulated advisers, and his firm has never wanted to operate in this way.
Alexander Beard operates in multiple jurisdictions around the world, and has to some extent benefited from Brexit, and the end of passporting, as clients flocked its way looking for help when UK based advisers withdrew from the market.
But he still takes the view advisers can help clients with their UK affairs, even when they have moved abroad.
In a Q&A with FTAdviser in Focus, Beard explains the hurdles cross-border advisers are having to jump, how his firm benefited from Brexit and which policy he would scrap if he was in charge.
FTA: Tell me about your firm and the types of clients you work with
PB: The firm is multi-faceted, we have a wealth management business in the UK, which is 36 years old, and we have an international employee benefits division that's been going for 17 years, and we have an expat services (advice) division, which has also been going for about 20-25 years.
We started off the expat business because a lot of our clients from the late 80s and the early 90s were in the music and entertainment industry – many of them went to work and live overseas. We followed them. because we wanted to keep looking after their business that they'd left behind, that we'd set up for them – pension funds, savings plans, investment accounts, that sort of thing.
And that just really snowballed from there. And now our expat business has got offices in California, in Johannesburg, in Lyon in France and Perth in Australia, and one in Dublin as well.
FTA: How has Brexit affected your work and your clients?
PB: It has and it hasn't. Because we've got offices in Europe in countries that are still in the EU they maintain their passporting permissions. So we're able to continue to look after our clients across Europe that way.
But we've always taken the view that wherever a client lives, as long as we're not active in that country promoting business then we are still entitled contractually to look after that client's affairs in the UK. Because they are not going to be able to get anybody else to look after them.
As long as we're not active in that country, marketing for new business or doing new business with that client in that country then as far as we're concerned we stay in our lane and we look after that client's affairs back in the UK.
