The CWA Edge
aka Personal Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
Have you ever wondered what helps a large company make complex financial decisions? Don’t you also face financial issues leading to involving multiple choices? The difference is that large companies have their own Chief Financial Officer. When you sign-up for our Wealth Management service, we act as your personal CFO to help you navigate smoothly through the rough financial seas.
We begin the process by charting your journey from Point A to B while keeping your long-term interests in mind. We spend time to understand every financial detail, your goals and aspirations, to arrive at the most suited asset allocation plan.
Apart from advising you on investments, we also look at your assets, liabilities, taxes, income and expenses. These aspects of your personal balance sheet are never isolated from each other. Occasionally or frequently they interrelate, As your personal CFO, we recognise this interrelation and take a systematic and integrated approach to unearth opportunities. This could mean finding ways for you to save more or how you can be more tax efficient.
We will advise you on ways to optimise your assets or even help you mitigate the impact of surprises in life. As your CFO, we will help you with tax-planning, risk management, estate planning, legacy planning and even charitable planning, when required.
To highlight our ‘always-on’ approach both the co-founders are available depending on the specific needs, and the aim here is to reassure you that an expert is always guiding your every step.
How is a Personal CFO different from a traditional agent/distributor?
| Traditional Agent/ Distributor | CFO |
| Primarily focuses on investment product | Primarily focuses on YOU |
| Deploys investments | Investment + tax, risk management, estate and charitable planning |
| Incentive driven recommendation | Fiduciary role; Objective/Goal based advise |
| Opaque earnings in forms of commission, sales and target incentives | Transparent earnings through fees |
| Transaction based approach | Relationship based approach |
What good are products and offerings if they don’t help you achieve your goals? In our own journey, we have realised that there are no bad products., Rrather, there are investment decisions taken without fully understanding the goals and aspirations. Keeping this in mind, we have designed our offerings to suit different needs.
Wealth management:
wealth management goes beyond just active management of investments or the creation of retirement plans. It is an all-encompassing service designed to help you make the most out of the available resources and protect you from uncertainties.
Our integrated wealth management service includes:
- Financial Planning
- Investment Management
- Asset Allocation
- Risk Management and Monitoring
- Cash Management
- Wealth Transfer
- Charitable Planning
- Tax Advisory.
The first step, in wealth management, is to get an overview of where you are currently. We also understand your goals, aspirations, desired lifestyle, risk appetite, concerns and fears to help us define the purpose and horizon of your investments. Based on this information, we use our financial modelling process to design our investment strategy and recommendations that are best suited to you.
Beyond planning, we also help you to be better prepared for life’s surprises. We believe this is the most critical part of wealth management. The best-laid plans can become irrelevant in seconds unless you have plans to mitigate against uncertainties . The purpose of this step is to make sure that if disaster strikes in your life, you have done what it takes to protect yourself.
We cover the entire spectrum of your financial needs - tax-advisory, risk management, wealth transfer, and charitable planning. Depending on your long-term goals, we also help with education or retirement planning. We rigorously monitor your investments and suggest new strategies in response to changing dynamics. We also provide consolidated quarterly performance reviews so that you are assured that the investments are on-track.
The 360 wealth management service has been designed so that you do not have to spend time worrying about your investments and can instead focus on your life’s passions as well as quality time with your family and loved ones.
Investment Management:
When you invest, isn’t one of the biggest challenges in knowing which product meets your needs and risk appetite? There are countless experiences around us, where the investment is made, but the desired outcomes are way below the objectives. Even when you begin to make sense of the product, the market dynamics may change and that may bring its own set of unlearning. This constant uncertainty leads to doubts, which in turn clouds our better judgement.
Knowing this, we have a proprietary process for navigating the uncertainties of the volatile market. Our model helps devise an automated, emotion-free investment strategy and plan the investment to suit your needs and objectives.
Here’s how we do this:
- Selection: we do thorough research on the product, and then filter down to the most suitable option for our clients keeping both risk and time horizon in mind
- Monitoring: after the investment has been executed, we monitor the attributes of the product whilst keeping an eye on new products
- Rebalancing: this is the key step where we make dynamic adjustments to the portfolio based on market movements.
- Exit: we exit the product based on a change in fundamental attributes or change in investor interest
NRI Services
If you are a Non-Resident Indian, investing comes with its own unique challenges like understanding the investment avenues and regulatory landscape. We have recognized these challenges and are your one-stop solutions shop where we not only help you be tax-compliant in India, but also make investments based on your needs
Some of the services we extend to our NRI clients include:
- India return filing
- Remittances in and out of India
- Determination of your residential status in India
- Interpretation of DTAA
- Handling of issues relating to inheritance, WILL, etc.
- Compliances filing (w.r.t. Income-Tax Act, Wealth-Tax Act, etc.)
- Application for Permanent Account Number (PAN)
- Advising on suitable investments
- Advice on opening NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts
Our Fees
At Circle Wealth Advisors, we are product agnostic and ‘customer-driven’. Which is why, when you opt to have your personal CFO, you are also opting for a long-term partnership to help you stay in line with your financial goals. As your fiduciaries, we have an obligation to act in your best interests. Hence, we work on fees only basis.
The Fee-Only approach allows us not to get driven by commissions, targets or other selling philosophies - which are industry norms. Instead, it incentivises us to handle your wealth from a purely advisory standpoint and in your best interest. It also helps us to give unbiased product recommendations to you, which will always be in line with achieving your objectives. This enables us to be truly walking alongside you, hand-in-hand.
We charge you a fee for all our services and this will purely depend on the quantum of wealth advised by us. The below table will help you understand our fee structure.
Fee Structure
| Assets under Advise | Fees applicable |
| INR 1cr - INR 5cr | 1.5% per annum + GST |
| Above INR 5cr | 1% per annum + GST |