Caroline's story

My name is Caroline Banwell. I’ve been a client of Sylvan for about three years, and my financial adviser is Ed Painter.

I got in touch with Sylvan because I was looking for a financial adviser who I could trust and somebody who would understand our risk profile.

I’d used a financial adviser a long time ago, and I happened to remember his name and Google it, and he put me on to Sylvan. He knew of Ed Painter and recommended him, and that’s how I got in touch with Sylvan.

We chose to go with Sylvan because when we met Ed, he came across as somebody we could really trust, who would understand things from our point of view and do the best for us.

Working with Sylvan has been like a breath of fresh air. I’ve used other financial advisers in the past, and Ed definitely feels like a very safe pair of hands. He seems like he’s got my interests at heart, and to be honest, I haven’t always felt that way about other financial advisers.

They’ve got a very useful tool on their website – a portal that provides a snapshot of your assets. That’s a very useful thing to know immediately when you go in, and I just know that everything’s in very safe hands.

In terms of my financial future, I’m one of those people who’s always a little bit nervous and thinks, “Will I ever have enough money to retire?” for example, but I definitely feel as if things are on the right road, and I feel well-served.

Sylvan is very responsive. They reply when I ask them to, and I can be sure when I, for example, make a pension payment that the pension payment is going to get to its destination and be properly invested.

I’m very pleased that I feel as if I’m with somebody who is steering a ship on the right course for my financial management that, to be honest, doesn’t interest me a great deal, so I’m very pleased someone else is doing that.

The three words I would use to describe Sylvan are “trust”, that they instil confidence in me, so “confidence”, they give me confidence, and they’re very “user-friendly”.

The best thing about working with Sylvan is that it leaves you free not to worry about your finances if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t really want to think about that too much.

I would unreservedly recommend Sylvan and Ed Painter to anybody, any of my friends, any of my family, and indeed I have done. In terms of why, I feel totally at ease with the advice that they give. I feel they’re very much on my side, trying to give me a clear financial picture of where I stand, what I can do with my money, and where I need to put it.