Your restricted adviser is unable to review existing products that you may already have in place.

According to the FCA:

A restricted adviser or firm can only recommend certain products, product providers, or both.

The adviser or firm must clearly explain the nature of the restriction. If you are not sure about the offer you should ask for more information.

Some examples of restricted advice are where:

• the adviser works with one product provider and only considers products from that company
• the adviser considers products from a limited range of product providers
• the adviser is unable to review existing products that you may already have in place.

Restricted advisers and firms cannot describe the advice they offer as ‘independent’.

So what…

Most investors will have allocated their capital to the markets.  Whether it is in Pensions or ISAs or General Investment Accounts.  It’s unlikely all of those investments will be bad.  The odds are some will be perfectly suitable. Yet restricted firms selling their services are only interested in switching investors to their own products. In fact, they shouldn’t be commenting on your investments.

It means you could be selling perfectly suitable investments you already own.  How does that make you feel?

Of course, the rhetoric to persuade you to switch will be first class, but for your own sake, having a conversation, independently, to help you feel more empowered, would seem obvious.