Busy professional and personal lives mean that time is often at a premium for high-net-worth individuals. However, taking a step back from day-to-day concerns to take an in-depth and holistic view of finance and personal wealth with the help of an expert qualified financial adviser, is time well spent. It is also among the best investments that you can make in yourself and your future.
That’s the experience of clients who turn to Unio Wealth Management, experts in this field.
Unio exists to meet the needs of people in Ireland who have accumulated wealth, yet they are time poor and are currently under-advised.
It represents an amalgamation of some of Ireland’s leading wealth management and employee benefits companies with the backing of Great-West Lifeco. In Ireland, Unio has more than 300 employees and oversees €14 billion of assets on behalf of personal and corporate clients.
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“We invested a lot in our people and the technology platform to support the integration of these companies and build our wealth capability for the future,” explains managing director, Ian Brady. “We are fortunate in what we acquired as we gained significant capability and top talent from each of the businesses.
“While personal wealth has grown significantly in Ireland in recent years, with the number of people with net assets of over €1 million having doubled in the last decade, Ireland is underserved in terms of wealth management advice.
“We make financial lives better through expert advice aligning our clients’ life goals with our years of experience in wealth planning and investments. This gives our clients immense peace of mind, maximises their wealth and unlocks their confidence in the future. That’s why we believe that time spent with us is truly time well spent,” Brady notes.
Many people are so busy working, they neglect getting advice around their full financial life, he says and operate piecemeal in terms of investment products that they may have bought through the years. There is a reluctance on the part of many people to look at the full financial picture, resulting in missed opportunity.
One clear and simple manifestation of this is the very high level of assets held in deposit accounts. About 47 per cent of Irish wealth, or approximately €150bn, is kept on deposit compared to 30 per cent in Netherland and Denmark, with around 90 per cent of this in the form of overnight deposits, attracting virtually no interest.
“This is holding individuals, households and us as a country back. The leveraged effect if people in Ireland sought expert wealth management advice and deployed their savings to further their financial lives would be immense. We believe we have a role to play to help arrest this situation,” Brady notes.
Maximising potential is a cornerstone of the Unio Way, and as chief commercial officer Aine McGroarty says, the process of helping people build their financial wealth starts with a dialogue in which clients sit down with Unio to discuss their circumstances and what is important to them, and this varies hugely depending on the person. “Our clients tell us that wealth means more to them than money or assets, it is about quality of life for the future and often about making big life decisions, we understand this, and this is what makes Unio different,” she says.
“We provide clients with a full bespoke financial life plan. We have a team of expert advisers and financial planners who help with that plan and clients get access to a dedicated financial adviser on their terms who can advise on their unique situation, where they want to get to in their financial lives and the best way to get there,” she says.
McGroarty likes to draw an analogy with a doctor’s visit for a full medical review. Clients get an expert opinion on their financial health and how to improve it and if required, can be referred for specialist tax or legal advice. Having established the needs and aspirations of clients, Unio works to develop a wealth plan, often involving a broad spectrum of investments and assets classes and taking relevant time horizons into account. The need for diversification and appropriate risk management strategies are key tenets of these plans.
While every client is different, the common denominator is that everyone has life goals and triggers such as saving for children or their retirement, and Unio’s mission is to use its professional expertise to help clients realise these, she says. The goal as their trusted adviser, is to move clients from passive wealth holders to active wealth builders.
The whole life and whole person approach taken by Unio involves taking a single view of a client’s holistic assets and how they can be managed for maximum benefit in a process that involves guiding, guarding and growing wealth. This moves the experience into a different realm from one where clients are simply sold products on a piecemeal basis. It puts them back in control of their lives.
“Traditionally the industry has been product-led and this has put people off engaging and seeking quality advice. People maybe have had disparate advice in terms of quality and engagement. Huge swathes of wealthy Ireland are under-advised in terms of the bigger picture, and this is where Unio can best serve clients,” Brady says.
Brady notes the research from the European Household Study on Finance shows that Ireland is one of the top countries in income per capita but is significantly lower in terms of financial literacy and very low on investment fund adoption. In many cases, professionals are accumulating wealth at a relatively young age and have a strong future earnings power – yet most often their wealth is concentrated on single stock options, he observes.
“We’ve grown up as a country and become wealthy very quickly in Ireland, but we have not adapted from an investment capability point of view. The opportunity cost of not performing well in this area is enormous. We understand that, in their day to day lives, clients don’t always have to time to think about their long-term financial journey. People may be time-poor but clients that invest time in the process with their Unio Wealth Management Adviser are making the greatest investment in their future and our experience is that those who invest in advice are twice as likely to feel positively about their future.”
If you would like to speak to a Unio Wealth Management Adviser, visit unio.ie. Unio Financial Services Ltd trading as Unio, Unio Wealth Management and Unio Employee Benefits is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland