Editorial: Watchdog image of IFAs is not that of most clients

Watchdog raised the case of one IFA - Nicholas Beards who runs Hermes Consultants in Cleveland, Yorkshire - who was jailed for 10 months for stealing around £200,000 from long-standing clients by advising them to put money into a single company and instead moving the money to his own. Lack of knowledge on the part of the clients may unfortunately have been their loss as they were offered investments providing returns of around 8-9% when they were looking for low risk investments. Any other IFA would have heard the risk assessment alarm bells if they had reviewed these “low risk/high retu...