RBC Brewin Dolphin‘s head of intermediaries, Ian Kloss, has placed clear, jargon-free communication at the centre of what good investment advice looks like, arguing that the ability to explain a portfolio as if the client knows nothing is not a soft skill but a professional discipline. For advisers managing clients who are approaching or already in retirement, that framing carries real weight: a client who does not understand what they own is a client who may panic at the wrong moment, with consequences for sequence-of-returns risk that no asset allocation model can fully offset.
The case for plain-language portfolio communication
The phrase attributed to Kloss, ‘explain investments like I’m an idiot’, is not a counsel of condescension. It reflects a principle that chartered financial planners have long held: that complexity in a client conversation usually signals a gap in the adviser’s own understanding, not sophistication. When a client in drawdown cannot articulate why they hold a mix of equities and bonds, or what role an alternative allocation plays in reducing volatility, the risk is not merely reputational. A client who sells in a downturn because they did not understand the volatility they had accepted is bearing a cost that cannot be recovered simply by waiting for markets to recover.
Kloss’s position at RBC Wealth Management places him at the intersection of discretionary fund management and the adviser community. The intermediary relationship is, by its nature, a two-stage communication chain: the investment manager must first make the portfolio comprehensible to the adviser, and the adviser must then translate that into language the end client can act on. A failure at either stage creates the conditions for poor decision-making, particularly in volatile markets.
RBC Brewin Dolphin intermediaries: background and experience
According to Professional Adviser, Kloss brings over 28 years of experience in regulated financial services, spanning insurance and financial planning as well as investment management. That breadth matters in the context of client communication: someone who has worked across product types understands that the language required to explain a with-profits bond is entirely different from what is needed to describe a global equity fund or a multi-asset income portfolio.
RBC Wealth Management records show that Kloss joined RBC Brewin Dolphin in 2021, stepping into a role that requires him to support independent financial advisers and wealth managers who use the firm’s discretionary services. The intermediary channel is the primary route through which many UK savers in accumulation or drawdown access managed investment solutions, and the quality of the relationship between the discretionary manager and the adviser directly influences the quality of client outcomes.
For a saver in their late fifties or early sixties reviewing their SIPP, the practical implication of this communication focus is considerable. A portfolio that the client understands is a portfolio the client is more likely to hold through a downturn. Behavioural finance has long established that panic selling in response to short-term market falls is one of the most persistent destroyers of long-term real returns. The antidote, in large part, is prior comprehension: a client who knows why they hold what they hold, and what time horizon that holding serves, is better placed to sit through volatility without crystallising a loss.
The risks on the other side of this argument are also worth naming. Plain language, taken too far, can obscure genuine complexity. A simplified description of a structured product or a leveraged fund that omits the downside scenario is not good communication; it is misdirection. The standard, properly applied, requires clarity about what can go wrong as much as what the strategy is designed to achieve. Kloss’s framing, as reported, does not distinguish between the two, but any adviser applying it well should.
Over a five-to-ten-year horizon, the firms that build durable intermediary relationships will likely be those where fund managers and advisers share a common language, one that is precise enough to be accurate and plain enough to be usable. RBC Brewin Dolphin’s intermediaries proposition, as Kloss describes it, is built on exactly that principle.
