A pattern familiar to many wealth managers is surfacing in the client adviser handover feelings that Emma Boardwell, founder of Emotional Finance, addresses in her advice column: a client who appears satisfied with every annual explanation, yet returns the following year with the identical challenge. The case in question involves a client who regularly compares his current personal pension against a legacy workplace scheme, questioning why the managed plan appears to underperform the one left behind.
The Performance Comparison That Keeps Returning
At each review, the client places the two performance charts side by side. The adviser, who inherited the relationship from a retiring colleague, explains the differences in charges, investment approach and the scope of the advice service. The current plan carries an advice fee; the original workplace pension does not. That fee funds lifetime cashflow planning, inheritance tax advice and general tax counsel. The client accepts the explanation. And then, twelve months later, asks again.
The original recommendation, which involved transferring a final-salary pension cash equivalent transfer value (CETV) into the new personal pension rather than into the existing workplace scheme, was made by the previous adviser. The Financial Conduct Authority has long required that defined benefit transfer advice meet a high suitability standard, meaning the inheriting adviser faces the uncomfortable position of defending a decision made before the relationship began, from conversations to which they were never party.
Boardwell’s reading of the situation, offered with explicit caution that it is speculative, is that the performance question may not be the real question at all. She suggests that recurring challenges which survive good answers often carry a disguised question beneath them. In this case, the disguised question may concern the handover itself.
Client Adviser Handover Feelings and the Psychology of Trust
Boardwell draws on the psychotherapeutic concept of object constancy to frame the pattern. Some clients, she writes, find it genuinely harder to hold on to a felt sense of a trusted relationship across the gap between annual reviews. A handover, even when handled with care, can leave clients carrying feelings of loss, unsettlement or, in some cases, something closer to abandonment. Those feelings are rarely addressed explicitly, leaving the client to manage them alone and the new adviser to build trust against an unacknowledged headwind.
Her suggested approach is to ask the question behind the question directly. When the performance charts appear again, Boardwell recommends language such as: ‘When we compare performance, even when it’s not a like-for-like comparison, maybe we aren’t getting to the real question?’ She suggests following that, if needed, with a more specific prompt about whether unresolved feelings around the previous adviser’s departure might be part of what surfaces each year.
For the inheriting adviser, this is a reframe worth considering at a portfolio-management level too. Client retention and relationship quality are themselves long-term assets. Boardwell also recommends that firms consider building additional touchpoints between annual reviews, particularly for clients who have experienced a handover, to sustain the sense of connection rather than relying on a single meeting each year to re-establish it.
Emma Boardwell is a qualified UKCP Gestalt psychotherapist, DipFA-trained financial and relational coach, and founder of Emotional Finance. Her column responses draw on psychotherapeutic insight but do not constitute clinical or therapeutic advice.
