Robert Campbell Featured on Citywire.co.uk Regarding the Client Ownership Debate After Towry
Following the legal battle between Towry and Raymond James, the IFA community is close to reaching a consensus for protocol on client ownership. Despite progress made over the past year, challenges still remain to reaching a set of guidelines that would give clients the option to choose their adviser as well as protect firms from losing clients and assets.
Robert Campbell, partner at Faegre Baker Daniels who represented Raymond James against Towry, said an ideal protocol would introduce a period in which a client can be contacted by an adviser leaving a firm and by the firm itself, and allow them to choose which to have as their adviser. Speaking with Citywire.co.uk, Campbell said, "This is a move toward something that's in the client interest because it causes both [the departing adviser and their old firm] to be as frank and transparent with the client as they possibly can be."
He shared that this would result in better outcomes for clients because IFAs would advise clients for the long term, in the knowledge they could take them with them if they moved firms. "There would undoubtedly be more transparency. The client needs to know what they're paying for, what they're getting and what's motivating the guy that's advising them. If someone is at a firm where he knows his relationship will be severed [if he leaves], inevitably the longer-term interests of the relationship with the client are not going to be as prominent," he added.
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