The impact of the end of the Brexit transition period
As a UK-based platform, we believe there's limited impact on UK-based advisers and clients from the Brexit agreement. There are some changes that will affect any clients who are resident in the European Economic Area (EEA) and we've created this helpful FAQ to provide more detail.
We need you to let us know as soon as possible if you have EEA resident clients on the Nucleus platform and if you're continuing to advise them or have stopped providing services.
Please contact your regional client relations manager to let them know.
FAQs
As we’re a UK platform aimed at UK advisers and their UK clients there should be a limited impact from the outcome of the Brexit negotiations. The main exception is where advisers have clients who are European Economic Area (EEA) residents – we’re aware of a small number of Nucleus clients who are in this position. This means from 11pm on 31 December 2020, changes take effect that may affect your ability to advise/service any of your clients who are resident in an EEA country. The changes include an end to ‘passporting’ – the ability to do investment business in EEA countries – and access to UK bank accounts.
You’ll need to have regulatory permission or authorisation in whichever country/countries you want to be able to advise clients in or do investment business in. That involves you obtaining the relevant permissions from the regulators in each of those countries by following the prescribed process. The FCA has no power to give such permission or authorisation. If you decide you don’t want to seek permission to do business in an EEA country, you won’t be able to advise or service those clients and must tell them what this means for them i.e. you’re no longer authorised to deal with them.
You may have already made your decision to stop advising affected clients and communicated this to them. We’d appreciate if you can please confirm if you have, or are planning to do this and let us know the action being taken. It’s important we can correctly classify customers on our platform as being advised or ‘orphaned’.
If your relationship with any EEA resident clients comes to an end, we’ll remove your access to their account on the platform and stop all ongoing fee payments. We'll continue to service their existing accounts on our platform and provide them with the details of the restricted services we'll offer. We always recommend a customer seeks financial advice before making any decisions about their investments and will ask customers to consider appointing a new, appropriately authorised, firm.
Some UK banks are forcing the closure of EEA resident clients’ bank accounts and your clients may need to find another UK bank account to be able to continue to receive withdrawals or income payments from us, or set up regular direct debit payments. We don’t know which banks are closing bank accounts or are still offering UK bank accounts to EEA residents. It’s important that your clients have an open UK bank account aligned to their Nucleus accounts, as we’re unable to support payments to overseas bank accounts.
If you obtain permissions to advise and service clients resident in the EU, we’re unfortunately unable to offer you our IMX managed portfolio service for these clients.
As a UK platform, dealing with UK advisers and clients, there’s no GDPR impact for us. The UK government will onshore the EU GDPR into a UK GDPR, so our data protection obligations remain the same.