Assessing customer needs
Assessing your customer's needs involves gathering and recording all relevant factual information together with their aims, financial aspirations and views on the degree of risk they are prepared to accept when it comes to investing to achieve these.
Tools
Assessing customer needs
There are lots of different ways of gathering and recording information about your clients. Our tools provide some ideas of how you might do this and help you consider if you are capturing all necessary information. They are not prescriptive and how you choose to use them may depend on your firm's size and business model.
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Factsheet: Knowing your customer and assessing their needs [PDF]
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Our one page good and poor practice guide highlights some examples of how firms are recording "know your customer" information.
Does your ‘Know Your Customer’ information show the full picture? [PDF] -
Consider how you might gather information before, during and after meeting with your client. Our pre-meeting questionnaire might help you think about how you can gather "softer" facts about your client.
Start thinking about your money [PDF] -
Our example agenda also offers suggestions for what to cover in your client meeting.
Possible agenda for initial customer meeting [PDF] -
Assessing attitude to risk is an important area. Our adviser prompt highlights some of the key points to cover.
Attitude to risk – an adviser prompt [PDF]
Remember
The ideas for these tools have been provided by firms, similar to your own, who are already successfully using them in their daily work.

