You will produce a complete recommendation file for one practice client from fact-find to signed disclosure.
A complete file is the thing most new representatives have never seen. They have seen forms, and they have filled in sections of them under time pressure, but they have rarely sat with one client's whole file and asked whether a stranger could follow it from start to finish. This project is that exercise. You build the full file for one practice client, then hand it to someone who was not there and fix whatever they cannot follow.
Produce a complete recommendation file for the practice client whose fact-find and needs analysis you wrote in lesson 3.5, Run and write up a full fact-find. The file should take a reader from the client's situation to a signed disclosure, and every step should be visible on paper.
Use your firm's forms if you have them, and add pages of your own where the forms leave something out. If you have no firm forms yet, a plain document with clear headings will do, because a reviewer cares far more about what is in it than how it looks.
Allow about an hour for assembly and a further session after the cold read for revisions.
Start from what you already have. Put the completed fact-find and the ranked needs analysis from module 3 at the front. Do not rewrite them to suit the recommendation. If you notice something missing, add it as a dated follow-up note, which is what you would have to do in a real file.
Write the rationale. For each recommendation, follow the order from lesson 4.1, What a reasonable basis looks like on paper: the need, the product and the reason it meets the need. Then the alternatives you considered, including doing nothing, each with a reason it was set aside. Then the affordability check, using the cash flow figures from the fact-find: surplus, premium or amount, and what remains.
Add the disclosure record. Using the four headings from lesson 4.2, Disclosure the client actually understands, record what the client pays, what they get, what is not covered and what it costs to stop early. Include the client's own answers to your understanding questions, in their words, and note which documents they received and when.
Add a section on what the client declined to share. Lesson 3.1, Why the fact-find is the most important meeting, covered recording a refusal. Here you go one step further and say how each gap limited the advice. If your practice client shared everything, write that explicitly, so the reader knows the section was considered and not forgotten.
If the case involves a replacement, include the side-by-side comparison from lesson 4.3. If the client chose something other than your recommendation, include the file note from lesson 4.4.
When the file is assembled, give it to a colleague, a supervisor or a fellow learner who was not in the meeting and does not know the client. Ask them to read it as a reviewer would and to write down every question the file does not answer. Do not explain anything while they read. Your explanations will not be there when a real reviewer opens the file.
Typical questions from a cold reader look like this. Why this sum assured and not a higher one? Where did the household spending figure come from? Did the client know the premium could go up? Why was the existing group cover not enough? Most of these point to something missing from the file, while the advice behind it may be perfectly sound.
Then revise. For each question, add what is needed in the right section, so the next reader would not have to ask. Sometimes the answer shows the advice itself was weak, for example a sum assured that was a round number with no basis, and then it is the advice you change before you touch the wording. Then give the file to the same reader, or a new one, and repeat until there are no unanswered questions.
Wei Ling builds a practice file for Hafiz and Nadia. Her cold reader is a colleague from another team, and he comes back with five questions. Three are quick fixes: the date the product summary was sent was missing, Nadia's understanding answers were in Wei Ling's notebook but not the file, and the reason for setting aside whole life cover gave no figures.
Two are harder. He asks why the term ends when the daughter turns 25. The honest answer is that it seemed sensible, which is not a reason. Wei Ling goes back to the couple's objectives, finds they had said they wanted the mortgage paid and their daughter through university, and writes the term in those terms. He also asks whether the affordability check allowed for Nadia's year off. It did, but only in a sentence buried in another section, so she moves it into the affordability check where a reader would look for it.
On the second read, he has no questions.
A finished file contains the fact-find and ranked needs analysis, a rationale for each recommendation in the order need, product and reason, a list of alternatives with reasons, an affordability check with figures, a disclosure record with the client's own words, a section on declined information, and any replacement comparison or client-choice note that applies. Attached to it are the cold reader's questions and a short note of what you changed for each.
The activity below asks you to assemble that file for your practice client and keep revising until a cold reader has nothing left to ask.
Assemble a full recommendation file for your practice client and revise it until a cold reader has no unanswered questions.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).