Many advisers fell into the profession of financial planning and this was the same for Shannon Currie, director at Perceptive Planning.
Speaking to FTAdviser as part of our Coffee Corner series, Currie said she had an unorthodox landing in to financial advice as she didn’t grow up knowing that was what she wanted to do.
How did you actually become an adviser?
“I was over here backpacking, and because I'd worked in a vehicle insurance company in South Africa - I did some temp work for a firm in Chelmsford,” she said.
“They actually had a pensions department, a car insurance, short term insurance department, and investments and the investments chap needed some help and it was going to be working weekends.
“I was backpacking there so it was right up my street and I said of course I can help you.”
Currie said she spent two or three weekends helping the firm move everything across to Crest.
It was a discretionary investment firm so they had to get together all the of what the clients held to make sure that the certificates matched their holdings.
“I clearly showed perhaps some of the details that you need for something like that so in actual fact, that chap arranged for me to transfer from car insurance to the investment side, and it just went from there,” she said.
“He put me through all my different CII exams and the IMC since it was a DFM and I was the director within two years.
“I joined them on the basis that I'll work for you, nice salary and then I'm going off travelling and I just never left.”
It's amazing it actually made you want to stay. From then until now, what would you say has been the biggest change?
Currie explained that being a financial adviser is the perfect job for somebody who loves people and numbers.
“We all love a spreadsheet or at least the geeks amongst us because spreadsheets have a convention and a set of rules and nowadays, they tell you when you've got something wrong with the formula, which is quite fantastic,” she said.
The firm she was working with at the time was a discretionary investment financial adviser and had client bank accounts, individual cash management accounts.
“My boss at the time just had a fantastic view of dealing with clients so I was very lucky that the whole thing of fees did not frighten me in the same way when RDR came along,” she said.
“Of course platforms then started to look like what we'd been doing behind the scenes so for me.”
She added: “The joy, for me, which has been one of the biggest changes is now when I go to any form of industry event, I see women which is quite wonderful.
“I don't normally make a big thing of women but it was often I was the only person or perhaps only one other and that for me has been lovely. That really has been a quiet revolution but it's been quite fantastic.”
