Mercer has today unveiled its new Mercer Jelf Financial Planning brand that brings together the Mercer and Jelf financial planning teams to deliver a combined proposition.
Services will be focused around three core offerings to individual clients. Executive financial counselling is a diagnostic service that employers can provide for high earners, giving access to a financial planner. The financial advice service can be wide-ranging or specific to a particular event-driven issue or programme, such as changes to rewards or benefits, changes to pension tax allowances, or leaving service through retirement or redundancy. It can encompass a high level of technical financial planning advice on just about every aspect of preserving managing and building wealth.
The third offering, retained wealth management, is a holistic financial planning service designed to help individuals develop a financial plan and maintain it on an ongoing basis that sees the client supported with face-to-face advice and reviews, and an ongoing programme of engaging communications.
Jelf’s original financial planning business operated from Bath, Bristol and Reading. The combined Mercer Jelf Financial Planning business employs around 100 staff and works with over 2,500 individual clients on an ongoing basis, and now includes operation centres in London, Manchester, Leeds and Edinburgh. Mercer Jelf Financial Planning holds Chartered Financial Planner status.
Mercer UK market leader Fiona Dunsire says: “The launch of the Mercer Jelf Financial Planning brand marks another milestone in Mercer’s strategy to offer a broad range of services to companies and their employees. Our purpose is to help clients advance the wealth, health and careers of their employees and the provision of financial planning is integral to that.”
Mercer partner and consumer business commercial leader Richard Wilson says: “The pensions and financial health industry continues to experience major change. The introduction of pension freedom and the lifetime allowance reduction highlights that high quality individual financial advice is becoming increasingly important to an ever-growing audience. Our priority since the acquisition has been to ensure that clients’ positive experience of dealing with both parties is unchanged. We are now ready to begin rolling out the new Mercer Jelf Financial Planning brand and proposition in all communications and marketing activity.
“The battle amongst employers to recruit and retain the best quality talent continues to intensify. Mercer Jelf Financial Planning has in part developed these services in response to increasing demand from employers to facilitate impartial guidance and financial advice for their employees from a trusted source. This can cover employer-sponsored benefits as part of a broader employee engagement strategy, and extend further into an employee’s wider financial affairs, overall leading to a happier and more productive workforce.”
