FCA Number
Company #
Region
Website

787328

9940516

Registration ID
Date Certified
Last reviewed

Brief history
Berry & Oak was founded in January 2018 when the founders (a husband and wife team) decided to be directly regulated by the FCA, and moved their business from its previous network umbrella, retaining their existing staff, clients and offices. Its roots go back to June 2004 when Andrew first started his independent financial adviser business and it has continued to be run with the same focus on excellent client service, highly qualified and doing the right thing consistently. Our mission is to help clients make the most of their life without the fear of running out of money. Berry & Oak likes to compare itself to its peers, and continuously developing to ensure they maximise the client experience. To do this they enter the professions awards and have won over five national awards including the coveted Accredited Financial Planning Firm of the year in 2019 and over 12 regional awards, including the citywire firm of the North for the last four years.
Client locations
Typically, Berry & Oak clients are in the Yorkshire area, though they are increasingly being approached from clients from further afield, especially London, where they now have 10 clients.

A professional standard for the best financial planning firms

RQ Certified is an accreditation scheme for financial planning firms in the UK. It is a key element of the wider RQ professional collaboration ecosystem, but it's also an important standalone scheme that shines a light on the best financial planning firms.

The Certified process delves into the inner workings of a financial planning firm, covering its client proposition, the structure and governance underpinning the delivery of services and advice to clients, its trading and regulatory history, and financial soundness.

It is an objective, comprehensive assessment focused on helping consumers and other professionals, such as accountants and lawyers, understand the metrics that matter when choosing a financial planning firm to work with.

Simply put, RQ Certified represents the best financial planning firms in the UK.

More than a badge

Financial planning firms that successfully become RQ Certified are able to showcase their accreditation with the official RQ Certified badge, showing industry peers, insurers, collaborators, and consumers that they’ve passed the robust process. They also get a public profile and included in our Certified firms database.

In addition, RQ Certified firms are showcased on the RQ platform where the hallmark serves as an important due diligence tool for accountants, lawyers, and other professionals seeking great firms to collaborate with.

Why RQ Certified matters

You run, or work for, a great financial planning firm. You’re up there with the best in the business. But how do you communicate and evidence this to consumers, other professionals and PI insurers? More importantly, how do you make your firm’s quality really count and drive the growth of your business more effectively?

Planning firms can use other available certification processes, many of them very good, helpful and important, including, and in particular, that of the Accredited Financial Planning Firms. But these focus on specific elements of what makes firms and client outcomes better rather than considering all elements, as RQ does.

In addition, other processes lack the commercial cut-through: top-quality financial planning has the power to change lives, but do accountants and lawyers know how good you are, in absolute terms and relative to the alternatives out there? Do they understand why you’re better than many, if not most? Do they know what truly makes a good firm good?

That's why we've built RQ Certified.

Why RQ Certified matters for professional collaboration

Alongside RQ Monitoring, which aggregates essential data on all FCA-registered firms, enabling monitoring in realtime, RQ Certified provides a robust quality assurance standard that objectively, broadly and deeply evaluates firms.

In effect, RQ takes the due diligence strain for accountants and lawyers and helps them find great financial planning firm to work with, compliantly and confidently justify and evidence their decisions and actions in referring to their existing referral partners, or identify possible shortcomings and preferable alternatives.

Other elements of the ecosystem, including the platform and RQ Partnerships, support RQ Certified in overcoming the barriers to referrals and making collaborating much more modern, transparent, comfortable and easy.

Initial assessment

Firms which pass the initial assessment progress to a second stage. Where there is a marginal pass or a fail, RQ will provide helpful feedback and welcome a subsequent resubmission.

Firms applying for RQ Certification go through a two-stage process. In the initial assessment, firms answer a set of questions on, for example, advice areas, investment philosophy, fees, financial management, team and so on. They must also provide standard accompanying documentation (which good financial planning firms would typically already have in place).

Full assessment

The second, 'full' assessment stage includes physical or virtual site visits by RQ's Certified team. The applicant firm must also provide further documentation detailing its inner workings, for example evidencing its financial stability, insurance policies and specific financial planning work with clients.

Annual refresher

RQ will conduct a refresher assessment annually, using pre-populated forms which only require relevant edits and updates. These will identify potential areas of improvement for firms. A more in-depth reassessment will be conducted every three years.