Financial Advisors Editing and Proofreading Services

Advice is a spoken profession with a written record, and the two often diverge. An adviser can explain a recommendation clearly in a meeting, and then produce a report that nobody in the room would recognise: forty pages assembled from a back office system, describing the products rather than the reasons. Years later, when a client complains or a regulator reviews the file, that document is the only evidence of what was recommended and why. The conversation is not the advice. The report is.

We edit what advisers and advice firms produce — suitability reports and recommendation letters, fact-find summaries and client objective statements, risk profiling explanations and attitude-to-risk discussions, annual review reports and ongoing service documentation, cash flow modelling explanations and assumption disclosures, pension transfer and retirement income advice documentation, protection and estate planning recommendations, client agreements and service and fee schedules, disclosure and initial disclosure documents, replacement business and switching justifications, complaint responses and file review remediation, and marketing and client acquisition material. Our editors check that the recommendation follows visibly from the objectives recorded, and that the client's own words survive into the document.

The suitability report is the document that defines this profession, and the most common failure is that it argues for the product rather than for the client's situation. A well-written report opens by restating the client's objectives in their own language, including the ones the adviser is not addressing and why; then explains what the client currently has and what is wrong with it; then makes the recommendation and — the part that matters most — sets out the alternatives that were considered and the specific reason each was rejected for this client. Where a recommendation involves giving something up, such as a guarantee or a protected benefit, that trade-off belongs in its own paragraph in plain words, not as a bullet in a risk section. Reports written this way are shorter, are far more likely to be read, and are the only version that reads well in a complaint file three years later, when the market has fallen and the client remembers the conversation differently.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including client files and reports in draft — anonymise or redact as your obligations require. We are editors rather than advisers, and nothing we do is financial advice or a view on suitability; the recommendation and its compliance sign-off remain entirely yours. What we can do is make your reports clear, personal and defensible.