Independence by design: how Select removes investment conflicts for trustees

How Select makes independence verifiable

Trustees should not have to take independence on trust. Five features make it verifiable. A single revenue source: the tiered consultancy fee, with every other cost itemised in the fee estimate before engagement. An independently chaired Investment Committee: the most consequential decision, which funds are approved, sits outside the firm’s own commercial reporting line. No client-asset holding: EWCL’s regulatory registration explicitly prevents Enhance from holding client assets, and custody sits with the platform partner instead. Trustee approval on every recommendation: no investment is implemented without it. And public trustee testimonials and named clients that trustees can verify directly.

Why structural independence beats individual integrity

The point of structural independence is not that individuals at conflicted firms behave badly; many do not. The point is that integrity at the level of an individual adviser cannot reliably overcome incentives at the level of the firm. A well-meaning adviser at a firm that earns retrocessions will, over many decisions, be pulled in the direction the retrocessions suggest, even if no single decision feels conflicted. Structural independence solves the problem at the right level. It removes the pulling incentives. It places the most consequential decisions outside the firm’s commercial reporting line. And it separates advice from implementation, and implementation from custody. None of these features depends on the goodwill of the individuals involved; each is built into the model itself.

What trustees should verify for themselves

Structural independence is a claim any adviser can make; trustees should test it rather than accept it. A useful line of enquiry is to ask any prospective adviser for a written breakdown of every source of revenue connected to the engagement, not just the headline fee. Compare that breakdown against what the adviser’s own regulatory registration permits. A second question is to ask who chairs the body approving the investment universe, and whether that person sits inside or outside the firm’s commercial reporting line. A third is to ask directly whether the firm holds client assets, since custody and advice sitting with the same firm is itself a structural conflict, regardless of how the relationship is described. None of these questions requires specialist expertise to ask; they require only that the trustee insist on a specific, verifiable answer rather than a general assurance.

The bottom line

The duty to take proper advice, advice the trustee reasonably believes to be qualified, relevant and impartial, is at the heart of trustee investment governance. Impartiality is the hardest of the three to establish, because most sources of investment advice carry structural conflicts the trustee may not be able to see clearly. Select is built to remove the conflicts at the structural level, and that is verifiable fact rather than opinion. For trustees who take the duty to obtain impartial advice seriously, structural independence is the right answer to the right question.