Important update for advisers
Few of us have lived through anything like the current COVID-19 situation. The front pages are full of coronavirus stories, social media has been extremely excited by it, and some of us have been personally impacted by it. It is one of the biggest challenges we’ve all faced as a society for a very long time.
At Parmenion, we are taking our own steps to manage the situation. Safeguarding our people is an absolute priority for us – we are committed to helping them stay healthy and well.
Equally important is continuing to deliver the service that you and your customers expect from us. Our Crisis Management Team (CMT) are fully mobilised and we are acting in line with official guidance and our plans.
As you would expect, we have procedures in place to make sure we can continue to run our business in situations like these with minimal disruption to you. As per our communications last week, our systems have been fully tested, and we are able to perform most of our business processes without people needing to be in the office. As a result, we already have a large proportion of our business working from home and anticipate this number to increase over the coming days and weeks.
Nothing should change in terms of our service to you – all contact channels continue to operate, including live-chat, email and telephone. We are also maintaining a minimal office presence to make sure we can process all incoming post – particularly important as we head into tax-year end.
Please help us to help you
We remain committed to maintaining high levels of service. But as we move to almost fully working from home, and our teams adjust to a different way of working, it would really help if you can raise your queries and questions with us through email and livechat, rather than telephone, over the next 10 days. Clearly, if you have an urgent matter or you simply need to talk to someone, we standby to take your call.
In addition, we are urgently looking at how we can remove the need for wet signatures in our application processes so that we can all submit and process business remotely – more news on this very soon. In the meantime, if you could ask your clients to send any money through BACS rather than cheques this will help ease the transition for all of us.
Our view on property fund suspensions
It won’t have escaped your notice that several property funds have now suspended trading. You can read more about our view on this here.
Continuing to support you
We are working hard to keep our business going for you – and while we won’t be able to see you for a while, we’ll be here just the same. We hope your businesses are coping too and you remain safe and well.
This article is for financial professionals only. Any information contained within is of a general nature and should not be construed as a form of personal recommendation or financial advice. Nor is the information to be considered an offer or solicitation to deal in any financial instrument or to engage in any investment service or activity. Parmenion accepts no duty of care or liability for loss arising from any person acting, or refraining from acting, as a result of any information contained within this article. All investment carries risk. The value of investments, and the income from them, can go down as well as up and investors may get back less than they put in. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future returns.