IFA's latest frustrating brush with Unbiased

HK Wealth Managers managing director Garry Hale said after being a loyal customer of Unbiased for more than 15 years, the quality of the service has lapsed significantly in recent years.

"The frequency and quality of enquiries is getting worse," he said.

Over the past few months, Hale said he had very few client enquiries from Unbiased, but recently had received several "junk enquiries" with false contact information.

"There is clearly no quality checks or filters in place and yet I pay over £50 a month then £45 plus VAT for [each] enquiry," he said.

Unbiased offered Hale a refund token to compensate for the false leads, but he felt it was "totally unacceptable to charge for spam enquiries and only offer tokens".

He said he believed the services was in breach of its contract with him and he would pursue the matter further. Hale has since left the service.

Unbiased founder and chief executive Karen Barrett said data protection and client confidentiality prevented her from going into detail about Hale's individual case, despite his account being closed.

"What we can say is that the length of time Garry has been with us is testament to how well we nurture our relationships with our customers, many of whom have been with us for a number of years," she said.

"We have many systems in place to ensure all our enquiries are of high quality, asking consumers for a minimum of six points of data to qualify their enquiries and ensure users are committed and genuine. We provide our advisers, including Garry, with tools to preview client enquiries and check their personal messages, so they can then decide whether they'd like to accept them.

"We offer a refund token if an enquiry is incorrectly submitted and did so with Garry, which he rejected privately and publicly on Twitter."

The directory this week revealed changes to the way advice firms can subscribe to its services with a new four-tier suite of plans.

His case was the latest in a spate of industry criticisms against Unbiased. In 2019, the former CEO of the Money Advice Service Caroline Rookes accused Unbiased of not living up to its name in a report on the British Steel Pension Scheme saga.

In June this year, Professional Adviser revealed a number of advice firms were falsely listing themselves as Chartered on the directory.

Unbiased has removed Hale's subscription and he said he was going to "consider his options" to reallocate his marketing spend. 

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