Quotation Management for Wealth Management: Fee Proposals Clients Can Compare

Wealth firms compete on a number and deliver a service, and the two are usually documented with wildly different levels of care. The fee is precise to two decimal places. The service is described as comprehensive, holistic and personalised, which tells a prospective client nothing and gives the firm nothing to point at when expectations expand over time.

A service schedule fixes this. Name the planning work included and how often it is refreshed. Name the review cadence and who attends. Name the reporting. Name what coordination with a tax adviser or a lawyer looks like, and what it does not. Clients are not offended by boundaries stated at the outset; they are offended by boundaries discovered in year three, when they were told the relationship was comprehensive.

The fee basis is a structural choice, not a number, and it changes what the proposal must disclose.

Whatever disclosure your regulator requires about how the firm is remunerated belongs on this document rather than in a separate pack the client never opens. A proposal that answers the question before it is asked is a competitive asset.

Tiered schedules exist to reward consolidation, but they only work if the client can see how the tiers are reached. Two mechanics do most of the damage when left unstated. The first is whether the schedule is marginal or blended, which changes the effective rate materially at exactly the asset levels clients care about. The second is which accounts are aggregated.

Household grouping is a firm decision — spouse, dependants, family trusts, business entities, held-away assets under advice — and clients consistently assume more is grouped than actually is. Listing the included accounts on the proposal removes the assumption. It also does something commercially useful: it shows the client, in concrete terms, what bringing another account across would be worth to them.

Minimums quietly reprice small relationships

A minimum annual fee is entirely reasonable, because servicing a relationship has a cost floor regardless of its size. What is not reasonable is presenting a percentage headline to a client whose portfolio sits well below the level at which that percentage overtakes the minimum. State the minimum, state the crossover point, and let the client decide with the real number in front of them.

Clients experience total cost, not advisory cost, and every layer they were not told about arrives as a small betrayal. Platform or custody charges, underlying fund expenses, transaction costs and statutory levies are all real, all borne by the client, and none of them accrue to the advisory firm.

Presenting them at proposal stage, itemised and marked as third-party costs, is simultaneously the honest thing and the commercially astute one. It inoculates the relationship against the first-statement conversation, and it lets a firm compete properly against a competitor advertising a lower advisory fee on a more expensive platform, which is otherwise an argument that cannot be won.

Unlike most quotations, an advisory fee schedule does not expire on acceptance. It becomes the governing arrangement for a relationship that may run for decades, and it will need to change at some point. Recording the effective date, the notice period for a change, and the process by which a client is informed turns a future fee revision into an administrative step rather than a crisis.

The same discipline applies to concessions. A discount granted to win a relationship is a decision with a very long tail, and firms routinely discover they are servicing substantial clients on terms nobody would agree to today, granted by someone who has since left. Attaching the reason, the approver and a review date to the version keeps legacy pricing a conscious position rather than an inheritance.

A wealth relationship converts in stages, and firms that treat the signed proposal as the finish line lose more assets than they realise. The agreement is signed, then account opening documentation is completed, then risk profiling, then transfer paperwork, then the assets actually arrive. Each of those stages can stall for weeks, usually for administrative reasons that a scheduled follow-up would resolve in a day.

Once funded, the operational systems take over entirely. Portfolio accounting, performance reporting, order management, custodian reconciliation, fee calculation and debiting, regulatory reporting, invoicing and your books all continue where they already live. What remains here is the commercial and relationship history: which prospects arrived and through whom, what was proposed, on which schedule and with what grouping, which version was accepted, what concession was granted and by whom, when the arrangement is next due for review, and why the prospects who chose another firm did.

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