January 27, 2020

Ethnicity and equity release: help ensure everyone gets good advice  

Prab Singh wants to know how language barriers and cultural differences affect the advice in order to raise standards for ethnic minority clients. Here’s how you can help

I’ve been specialising in providing and educating the ethnic community sector particularly the Asian community for several years now regarding the equity release market and solutions available. I am also an advisory member of the Equity Release Council and as such I have been tasked with looking into ways that can help all invested parties involved in the equity release process when dealing with ethnic minority clients.

Whilst the ethnic minority sector is a very niche area within a specialist market, it is an area that is and will grow overtime and needs to be approached with care, due to the obvious vulnerabilities of clients that fall within this sector and the inherit risks it poses.

You may already have had dealings with ethnic clients and may be familiar with the issues surrounding giving financial advice to such clients, especially regarding mortgage lending and the clients attitude to lending risk.

I myself am bilingual and understand the Asian culture extremely well, coupled with my financial experience and background, I can interact and educate such clients beyond being merely an interpreter as I understand both the benefits and ramifications of advising such solutions to ethnic minority clients.

Hence, I want to use this unique insight in helping our industry to interact with such with ethnic minority clients in a safe way that is beneficial both to the clients, non-bilingual advisers, lenders, networks and other parties in the equity release process.

I understand there are difficulties and risks in advising such clients whose first language may not be English, however, not providing a service to their needs is definitely not the right answer neither.

I myself at times face many challenges when processing applications with Asian clients from lenders and other parties who do not understand ethnic clients and the culture at all.  I acknowledge that there is a knowledge gap for lenders and others in this area and by working together with them I’m hoping to engage and help them fill in this gap so that they feel more comfortable when dealing with such applications.

With regards to non-bilingual advisors and networks, I am hoping to give some direction on understanding of the culture and how to interact with such clients in a way that looks to improve the safety of the advice for both the clients and advisor giving the advice.

We at the Council would like your thoughts on the above topic and want to understand how you currently deal with ethnic clients or what your concerns are when dealing with ethnic minority clients. I then plan to run a series of workshops to help our industry improve our standards when dealing with ethnic clients.

Please contact me via [email protected]

Prab Singh

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