How to Check a Wealth Manager Yourself, in About Twenty Minutes

Check First, Ask Questions Second

The standard advice for choosing a wealth manager is to interview several, compare their philosophies and pick the one you trust. That is fine advice for the second hour. It is bad advice for the first, because a persuasive meeting is exactly what a firm you should avoid is best at producing.

Almost everything you need for a first-pass filter is in a public register, free, and takes about twenty minutes. This is part four of our Access Series — after the classification tests, why minimums exist and the structures that lower them, the obvious next question is whether the firm offering you any of it is who it says it is.

Step One: Find the Legal Entity, Not the Brand

Wealth managers market under a brand and trade through a legal entity, and they are frequently not the same thing. The brand may be a group; the entity you actually contract with may be a subsidiary in another country, with different permissions and a different regulator.

Find the entity name and its registration number. They are usually in the small print at the bottom of the firm's own website, in the terms of business, or in the engagement letter. If you cannot find them, that is your first finding.

Step Two: Look the Entity Up on the Register

United Kingdom. The FCA describes its register as follows: "The FS Register is a public record of firms, individuals and other bodies that are, or have been, authorised by us or the PRA." It is at register.fca.org.uk, and the FCA notes that details about individuals, including current roles and disciplinary or regulatory action, are published there. (Verified at fca.org.uk/firms/financial-services-register, 8 August 2026.)

United States, investment advisers. The SEC operates the Investment Adviser Public Disclosure system at adviserinfo.sec.gov. We confirmed the service and its address on 8 August 2026; its descriptive text is delivered by a client-side application that our automated request could not render, so we are not quoting it. Note separately that sec.gov itself returned HTTP 403 to our automated requests, which is normal for that site and worth knowing if you are ever tempted to trust a third-party summary of an SEC rule over the rule.

United States, brokers. FINRA operates BrokerCheck at brokercheck.finra.org, whose page identifies itself as "BrokerCheck - Find a broker, investment or financial advisor" (checked 8 August 2026). As with IAPD, the descriptive copy is script-rendered and we have not quoted beyond the title.

Elsewhere. Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, the EU member states and the Gulf financial centres all operate equivalent public registers. We have not verified their URLs or contents and are not listing them, because a wrong register link is worse than none. Search for your regulator's name plus "register", and confirm you have landed on the regulator's own domain before you type anything.

Whichever register you use, you are looking for four things: that the entity is currently authorised; what activities it is permitted to carry on; whether the permissions match what the firm is actually offering you; and whether there is disciplinary or enforcement history attached to the firm or its senior individuals.

That third point is the one people miss. A firm authorised to advise is not necessarily authorised to hold your money. A firm permitted to deal in listed securities may not be permitted to distribute unregulated collective investment schemes. Mismatches between permission and pitch are among the most reliable warning signs available to a member of the public.

Step Three: Read the Disclosure Document They Are Required to Give You

In the United States, a registered investment adviser must deliver a written brochure. The rule at 17 CFR 275.204-3 provides: "If you are registered under the Act as an investment adviser, you must deliver a brochure and one or more brochure supplements to each client or prospective client that contains all information required by Part 2 of Form ADV", and requires the adviser to "deliver to a client or prospective client your current brochure before or at the time you enter into an investment advisory contract with that client." (Verified at law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/275.204-3, 8 August 2026.)

Read it. It is not a marketing document; it is a regulatory filing, and it contains the fee schedule, the conflicts of interest, the disciplinary disclosures and the description of what the firm actually does. Other jurisdictions have their own analogues — key information documents, terms of business, disclosure statements. The common feature is that the required document is duller and more candid than the brochure the sales team hands you, which is exactly why it is worth reading first.

Step Four: Separate the Adviser From the Custodian

Ask one question: who holds the assets? The answer should be a third-party custodian bank or broker with whom you have a direct relationship and from whom you receive statements independently of the adviser.

The historic catastrophes in this industry — the ones that wiped out clients rather than merely disappointing them — overwhelmingly involve firms that both advised on assets and held them, and produced their own statements. When the adviser, the custodian and the reporting are the same party, there is nothing outside the firm to contradict a false statement. Independent custody is not a guarantee of anything, but its absence should end the conversation.

Step Five: Read the Fee Stack Out Loud

Ask for every charge that will be applied, at every layer, in a single number and in cash terms on your expected portfolio size. There are usually more layers than the headline suggests: an advisory fee, underlying fund fees, platform or custody fees, transaction costs, foreign exchange spreads on multi-currency accounts, and performance fees where applicable.

If you hold assets in several currencies, the FX spread is often the largest cost nobody mentions; we cover the mechanics of multi-currency handling separately in our guide to wealth management tools.

What Each Check Proves, and What It Does Not

About Researching Named Firms

You will find long-established names in this space — Bessemer Trust, Glenmede, Northern Trust and many others — and it is entirely reasonable to shortlist them. What we will not do is publish their minimums, fee schedules or eligibility rules, because we could not verify any of those at the firms' own sources. Large financial websites frequently block automated requests, and a third-party summary of a private bank's minimum is precisely the kind of figure that is stale, regional, or simply wrong, and precisely the kind a reader would act on.

So the honest instruction is: look each firm up on the relevant register yourself, request their current disclosure document, and ask them directly for the minimum and the fee schedule in writing. Any figure you see quoted for such a firm — including on this site, if we ever slip — that does not carry a source and a date should be treated as decorative. Our page on what private banking actually is and what it costs structurally explains the fee architecture without inventing the numbers.

What to Ask in the First Meeting

• Which legal entity will I be contracting with, and what is its registration number?
• Which regulator authorises it, and what permissions does it hold?
• Who is the custodian, and will I receive statements directly from them?
• Are you acting as a fiduciary or adviser to me, as a distributor of products, or both? What changes between those roles?
• How are you and my relationship manager remunerated? Does any part of your pay depend on which product I choose?
• Show me the total annual cost, in cash, on a portfolio of my size.
• What happens to my assets if your firm fails?

Honest Limits

The register descriptions and the disclosure rule above are quoted from the regulators' own pages and the regulation text on 8 August 2026. We could not retrieve the descriptive text of IAPD or BrokerCheck because both are client-side applications, and sec.gov blocked our automated requests entirely; where that happened we have said so rather than substituting a summary. We have not verified any non-US, non-UK register.

A register check is a filter, not an endorsement. It reliably catches the unauthorised and it reliably catches permission mismatches. It cannot tell you whether a competent, honest firm is the right firm for your circumstances. Nothing here is legal or investment advice.

The Counter-Argument

A fair objection: this is a compliance checklist masquerading as judgement. Every firm that ever blew up was authorised on the day it blew up. Registers are backward-looking, disciplinary records take years to appear, and a clean entry has repeatedly meant nothing. Meanwhile the things that actually predict a good outcome — whether the people are any good, whether the advice fits your life, whether they will tell you no — appear on no register at all.

All true, and it still does not make the check optional. The point of twenty minutes on a register is not to identify the best firm. It is to remove the worst outcomes cheaply: the unauthorised, the permission-mismatched, the self-custodied, the firm whose principal has a documented enforcement history that the meeting did not mention. Do the cheap filter first, then spend your judgement on the survivors. Skipping it because it is insufficient is like refusing to lock a door on the grounds that locks can be picked.

FAQ

How long does this really take? For a UK or US firm, twenty to thirty minutes for the register and permissions, plus however long you spend on the disclosure document. The document is the slow part and the valuable part.

What if the firm is not on any register I can find? Ask them, in writing, which regulator authorises them and under what number. A firm that cannot answer that quickly and precisely has answered a different and more important question.

Does a disciplinary record automatically disqualify a firm? No — context matters, and large firms accumulate findings. Read what the finding actually says, when it happened, and whether the firm disclosed it before you found it.

Is an independent custodian really that important? It is the single structural protection most consistently absent from the frauds. Treat it as non-negotiable.