Choosing an adviser is one of the few financial decisions people make almost entirely on impression. A referral from a colleague, a confident first meeting, a website that looks the part — and then bank statements, identity documents, and in time the savings themselves.
The checks that would have told you most about that firm take an afternoon. They are not adversarial, and no reasonable adviser resents being asked. What follows is the order in which to do them.
Start with the entity, not the website
A website is a marketing surface. Behind it there is either a legal entity or there is not, and that is the first thing to establish.
Find the registered name — a private limited company, an LLP, a partnership, or a sole proprietor operating in a personal capacity. It will usually be in the footer, the terms page, or a disclosures page. If it appears nowhere on the site, ask. An adviser who cannot tell you in one sentence which legal person you would be contracting with has told you something important.
Then check what the firm is authorised to do. SEBI publishes its list of registered Investment Advisers, and AMFI publishes an ARN search for mutual fund distributors. Ask any firm to state, in writing, which registrations it holds and which it does not — the answer determines what kind of advice it can lawfully give you, and how it can be paid for giving it. This is the single most consequential check on this page, and it is the one most often skipped.
Then find the registered office. Ask for it if the site gives only a city, and check it against the registry rather than against a pin dropped on a map. You are not checking whether the office is impressive; you are checking that the firm is willing to be located and that the record agrees with what you were told. A business that is reachable only through a form and a mobile number is a business that can close and leave no forwarding address.
Finally, establish who does the work. Advisory firms are frequently sold by one person and staffed by another, which is not itself a problem — but you should know whether the individual who explained the approach to you is the one who will prepare your plan, review your portfolio, and pick up the phone in a difficult quarter. Ask for the name and the role. Ask what happens when that person is unavailable. A firm with an honest answer to the second question has thought about continuity; a firm that has never considered it is telling you the relationship depends entirely on one individual’s goodwill.
Why the trading name and the registered name differ
Very often the name on the door is not the name on the paperwork. A firm may trade as one brand while being registered as something longer and less memorable — a consultancy, a services LLP, a holding entity whose name predates the brand.
This is ordinary. Brands are chosen for clarity and registered names are chosen for availability at the registry, and the two rarely converge. A group may also run several lines of work under one legal entity, or hold the technology and the advisory practice separately.
What matters is not that the names differ but that the firm states the connection openly and states it the same way everywhere — on the website, in the engagement letter, on the invoice, and in the email footer. A firm that publishes both names without being asked has nothing to reconcile later. A firm that mentions the registered entity for the first time on the day you sign has been managing your impression rather than informing you.
Take the extra minute to check the registered name against the public registry. You are looking for existence and consistency: that the entity is real, that the address matches, and that the people described as running the firm are associated with it. Names similar to well-known brands are common, and firms with the same or similar names exist in other countries; confirm you are dealing with the entity you think you are.
Fees, conflicts, and the question most people skip
Ask how the firm is paid, and keep asking until the answer is arithmetic rather than adjectives.
There are only a few ways money reaches an adviser in India. A fee paid by you — flat, hourly, or as a percentage of assets. Commission or trail paid by a product manufacturer when you invest through them — which, for mutual funds, requires the firm to hold an AMFI ARN. Or some combination, where a planning fee sits alongside distribution income. Each is legitimate. Each creates a different set of incentives, and the incentive you should care about is the one that operates when your interest and the firm’s diverge.
So ask the follow-up. If the firm receives trail income, ask which products pay it and which do not, and how a recommendation is made between two comparable options where only one pays. If the fee is a percentage of assets, ask what happens to the advice when the best course is to hold cash, repay a loan, or buy property — decisions that shrink the number the fee is charged on. If it is a flat fee, ask what is inside it and what is billed separately.
Then ask the question people almost never ask: what did you do for clients during the last serious drawdown? Not what the portfolios returned — what the firm did. Did it call clients before they called it? Did it change the allocation, and on what basis? How many clients left? An adviser who has been through a bad market with real clients will answer this in specifics, because those months are memorable. One who deflects to long-term averages may not have been tested yet, which is worth knowing before you find out together.
What a good adviser volunteers
Some things you should not have to extract.
A competent firm tells you what it is not going to do — the products it does not advise on, the situations where it will refer you elsewhere, the limits of its competence. It tells you how it is paid before you ask, in writing. It gives you the engagement terms to read rather than to sign. It describes the review cadence and then keeps to it. It puts recommendations in writing with the reasoning attached, so that a decision made two years ago can be re-examined on its merits rather than defended from memory.
It is also candid about uncertainty. Markets are not forecastable to the precision that a confident presentation implies, and an adviser who never says “I don’t know” is either unusually gifted or not listening. What you want is a firm that distinguishes clearly between what it knows, what it estimates, and what it is guessing at — and that behaves consistently when it turns out to have been wrong.
None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary conduct of a professional relationship, and the reason to check for it early is that the alternative reveals itself slowly and expensively.
Checking us
InvestSight Capital is the trading name; the registered legal entity is Investsight Consultants LLP, based in Bengaluru (Bangalore), Karnataka, India. Written enquiries reach us at [email protected].
Businesses trading under similar names exist in other countries and are unconnected to this firm. Our legal identity, and the nature of the information published on this site, are set out on our disclosures page.
