This is how we do it: Advising divorcing couples

Acting as a financial go-between in lengthy divorce cases is hardly the most lucrative activity for an advice firm but it allows the opportunity to diversify from investment advice and establish good contacts with local law firms, according to Alan Turton, managing director of Leicester-based Rowley Turton.

A coincidence led Turton’s firm to consider putting one of its advisers through the Resolution accreditation to provide advice for divorcing couples. A prospective client asked for advice on his finances ahead of his divorce. The client’s solicitor said he could not legally recommend an adviser, telling him to look up a firm in the phone book. The number he picked was coincidentally the solicitor’s IFA, Rowley Turton.

After the chance meeting, Rowley Turton spotted an opportunity to diversify from investment business by advising on divorce cases and so director Scott Gallacher began to study for the Resolution exams.

After three teach-in days, Gallacher sat the exams and became qualified as a ‘financial neutral’, which means he can work as a go-between financial adviser to provide an independent assessment of assets in amicable divorce cases.

The course also taught him how to calculate the true value of pensions for divorce cases.Turton said financial-neutral advisers must charge strictly on a fee basis and must not have a previous or subsequent adviser relationship with either of the clients.

The collaborative approach required by the financial neutral means the divorce cases the firm deals with are ‘positively boring’, he said – a far cry from the wranglings immortalised in the Mills-McCartney break up circus.

But there was controversy over the accreditation last year, when law firm Resolution was forced to withdraw the course in March after advisers were suspected of cheating.

According to Turton news of the withdrawal does not detract from what the firm has achieved in meeting the accreditation.

The trouble is, with the lack of amicable divorce cases and the shortage of solicitors that have twigged that there are financial advisers who can offer divorce services, there is little scope for the divorce-conscious adviser, said Gallacher.

‘We’re in a strange position because there aren’t that many firms; the solicitors aren’t yet in the habit of using the accredited IFA, they are still using their old methods,’ he said.