OUR UNIQUE HISTORY GOES BACK TO 1995
Ayres Punchard was established in 1995 as a nil-commission, fees-only financial advisory firm, offering private investors the chance to align their investments with their values.
Back then, there were only a very small number of specialised ethical, green, or SRI (socially responsible investment) funds. When the company started, the way in which we went about investing was very much part of a broader, more conventional, ‘blended’ approach.
In 2009, we felt sufficiently confident to begin offering wholly ethical, sustainable, and socially responsible portfolios for those clients who wanted them. This led to us carrying out extensive research into the so-called performance cost of investing ethically.
A year later, we began to integrate ESG (Environmental Social and Governance) factors into our analysis process and investment philosophy.
By 2012, we had sufficient evidence to prove that sustainable investing often leads to outperformance over conventional investment strategies but that there could be a cost for ethical investors, depending on their requirements. This important distinction between ethical investing and sustainable and impactful investing has been a hot topic ever since.
The firm’s founder, Chris Welsford, was invited to make the keynote address to the Investment Week Sustainable Investment Conference in 2014. In that speech, to more than 100 SRI and ethical fund managers, Chris challenged the ethical fund management industry to clean up its act.
In 2016 the firm – and Chris – was featured as a ‘cover star’ in Citywire’s New Model Adviser, which praised the “unique perspective on business at Ayres Punchard”. They said, “the investment approach sets Ayres Punchard apart” from other advisers, with our “environmental, social, governance (ESG) – centred approach, incorporating three in-house model portfolios”.
Chris was awarded the Coastguard Good Conduct and Long Service Medal and retired from the Coastguard Rescue Service after more than 21 years of service at the end of 2023.
In 2018, against stiff competition and judged by some of the leading figures in socially responsible, sustainable and impact investing, Ayres Punchard won the inaugural Social Investment Academy Impact Champion award for a financial advisory firm.
We launched the Key to the Future model portfolio service in 2020, and it is available to all clients of Ayres Punchard. Please get in touch if you are interested in becoming a client of ours.
PRIVATE INVESTORS
We offer a wide range of financial and investment advice services, delivered holistically and ethically. Holistically, means that we take everything into account, often in conjunction with the advice being given by other professional advisers such as your accountant, solicitor or barrister. Ethically, means that we also take your personally held beliefs and values into account when advising you on how best to achieve your financial goals.
We provide a completely independent review of your financial situation. This includes a review of your vulnerability to insurable financial difficulties in the event of death, serious illness, disability, unemployment, or the need for long term care in old age.
We analyse your income, expenditure, and cash flow planning to help model your financial future. This helps you better understand and prioritise your objectives and requirements, and is the best way to let us know how to achieve them.
We specialise in providing advice that will help you to align your investments with your ethical and personal values. We do this on a bespoke basis that can enable you to include themes that are important to you, such as fair trade and carbon emissions reduction. We can also advise on how best to exclude certain activities such as weapons manufacturing and distribution or animal testing, for example.
We also operate an award winning model portfolio service that we call The Key to the Future. This is a sustainable and impactful investment portfolio that meets the needs of most clients who are looking to do no harm to people or the planet, whilst as the same time aiming to achieve their income and growth investment objectives.
We carry out detailed research on the underlying companies held by funds used in the Key to the Future. We use this research to carry out engagement with fund managers and in some instances we will call for a company to be sold because of its poor sustainability and or negative impacts on people and the planet.
We help you set and achieve realistic financial objectives. These may include retiring at a certain age or providing an income for retirement now. You may be worried that your pension pot isn’t sufficient to last your lifetime, or to provide for your loved ones. We can help you to assess the situation and, where needed, take action to make things work out the way you want.
Most importantly, we help you to review your financial planning objectives, and progress, on a regular basis. We offer different review packages to accommodate all requirements. Click here to see our client agreement, which provides full details of our financial planning process and review packages, including likely fees for these services.
Remember, we operate on a nil commission basis. In most cases, this greatly reduces the cost of financial advice to you and means that any advice you receive is not contingent on you buying a financial services product that you might not need.
We act for you and not the life insurance company or financial institution. We always remember who’s paying us!
Our independent financial planning service encompasses:
- Life insurance, income and other financial protection assessment
- Banking & cash savings advice
- Investment advice & portfolio management
- Retirement planning & creating a sustainable income in retirement
- ISAs and other tax efficient savings & investments
- Planning for old age & managing the affairs of older clients
PROFFESIONAL INVESTORS
We Can Help You - We’ve been doing this for almost 30 years. We understand the challenges advisers face in advising clients on ethical, sustainable, responsible, and impact investing. We know greenwashing and how to uncover it even when companies cleverly hide it by using powerful SEO techniques and marketing.
Help for Financial Advisers - We can help you design processes that will enable the right conversations to be had on subjects that you may not be comfortable broaching with clients. We can train your advisers on ethics and how ethics can be integrated into their financial planning work with clients. We can provide training on ethical, sustainable and impact investing, how they differ and how an understanding of each can help to unlock potential for better and more robust personal recommendations.
For advisers that don’t already have a sustainable and impact investment proposition we can help design one. Or you can have access to Ayres Punchard’s Key to the Future Model Portfolio Service, which will provide you with a robust and reliable ESG-focused, sustainable, impact-driven investment solution for your clients.
Help for Fund Managers and Investment Committees - Greenwashing is a big problem and often it is not recognised in time. This means decisions to divest are taken too late, resulting in avoidable loss.
We are very conversant with this aspect of portfolio management and carry out in-depth research into our own portfolio to uncover issues with investee companies, which are sometimes not the sustainable impactful saints that the fund managers believe them to be.
Armed with evidence and material arguments, we can help fund managers to have more effective engagements. In extreme cases we can help construct arguments for divestment that will help funds reduce the risk they could be exposed to from blatant greenwashing.
Ayres Punchard Investment Management Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Financial Conduct Authority registration number 492377.
