A Bastion of Integrity

Integrity: the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles that you refuse to change (Cambridge Dictionary).

We and our clients are at risk of drowning in a tidal wave of disinformation, lies and opportunistic attempts to divert them from the truth. Author and marketing expert Seth Godin described the problem in a recent post. He wrote:

“Any fully open system of digital communication will corrode over time. Bad messages will crowd out the good ones.

The new normal: Someone finds a database of every residential property, then another of cell phones. An AI is trained to call every homeowner, every day, asking if they’re thinking of selling their home. Millions of calls an hour. The leads (one out of 40,000 calls, perhaps) are sold to real estate brokers.

Multiply this by 500 different hustlers in a dozen industries, and now the open nature of the phone is gone forever.

And then texts.

And of course, email. An inbox with 100,000 unread messages in it is no longer a functional tool.

Open systems come with the requirement of self-restraint and humanity. When we replace those with automated stealers of attention with a profit margin, the system can no longer remain open.

Permission and trust keep going up in value, precisely as quickly as selfish forces work to succeed without them.”

We are seeing this in our own arena, one that is ripe for catching people’s attention with misleading, false and downright criminal mass-messages that act like open traps for our clients to fall in to. It’s no wonder that people are falling for crypto-currency cons and pension thefts on an unprecedented scale.

In the midst of all this noise and obfuscation, where can people turn to find the truth? How can they discern the genuine article from the scam attempt? How can they find reliable and well-resourced information to help guide them through the jungle? How can they stay safe?

One solution is for them to turn to us, their adviser. As Seth says, permission and trust keep going up in value. And that is where our own value lies.

To be the trusted partner, the valued guide, and the reliable source of information to enable our clients to make great decisions about their money, we need to act with the highest possible levels of integrity. We need to live and speak the truth. The information we provide and the advice that we give must be of the highest quality.

To achieve this, we need to know our subject inside out. That’s why we put such a strong emphasis on learning and qualifications at Chesterton House. If we don’t know the answer we need to know how to find it, and we need to check and double-check its veracity if there is any doubt.

And we need to demonstrate strong moral principles that we refuse to change. That’s why we put our values and beliefs at the heart of all our interactions between ourselves and our clients.

Let’s be the bastion of integrity that our clients can place their faith in, and on which they can rely to deliver the truth.

Andy Jervis

Chartered FCSI (Financial Planning)

Chairman

June 2024