What happens to my money if your firm shuts down or you retire?
What financial advisory firms need to publish
It is a legitimate concern about custody and continuity that clients rarely voice, and a clear answer about how assets are actually held addresses a real, if unlikely, risk.
How customers actually ask it
The same intent arrives in wording your page probably does not use. All of these mean the same thing:
- “What happens to my money if your firm shuts down or you retire?”
- “what if my financial advisor dies”
- “is my investment account safe if the firm fails”
- “SIPC coverage explained”
What a complete answer contains
For financial advisory firms specifically, an answer is only complete when it covers all 5:
- 1
Where client assets are actually custodied, and that this is typically separate from the advisory firm itself
- 2
What SIPC protection covers and, importantly, what it does not cover
- 3
Practical continuity planning — a succession plan or arrangement in place if the advisor is unable to continue
- 4
That the client always retains direct access to their custodian account regardless of what happens to the advisory relationship
- 5
How a client would be transitioned to a new advisor if the firm did close
A worked example
Illustrative — not a real business
Your assets are held not by us directly, but by an independent, third-party custodian — we manage the account, but we never have physical possession of your money, which is an important distinction for exactly this scenario. That custodian is typically a large, SIPC-member brokerage, and SIPC protects up to 500,000 dollars per account, including 250,000 in cash, against the custodian's failure or fraud — though it is worth knowing plainly that SIPC does not protect against investment losses from market performance, only against the custodian itself failing. We maintain a written succession plan naming another qualified advisor who would step in to serve our clients if something happened to the principals here, so the relationship has continuity built in rather than depending on any one person. And regardless of what happens to our firm, your account and its assets remain accessible to you directly through the custodian at all times — we could disappear entirely and your money would still be exactly where it is, under your name.
Which page should own it
Custody and continuity page
What silence costs
An unaddressed fear about custody is a real barrier for anyone moving a significant sum, and it deserves a factual answer rather than a vague reassurance.
More questions financial advisory firms get
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industry
AI customer support for financial advisory firms
The single most consequential thing a prospective client can know about a financial advisor is how they're compensated and whether they're legally bound to a fiduciary standard — most people never ask, and the answer genuinely changes whose interest is being served. RubyRep discloses this proactively, answers general process questions fully, and never gives specific investment or allocation advice without an actual engagement.
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What is AI customer service?
AI customer service means answering customer questions with a language model rather than a person. The useful implementations are grounded in a specific business's own content; the poor ones let a general model improvise, which produces confident answers that are wrong.
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What is a knowledge base?
Traditionally a knowledge base is a help centre humans read. For AI support it is the source material a representative answers from — which means an ordinary website, well written, can serve as one without a separate help centre.
Does your site answer this already?
Point RubyRep at your website and ask it this exact question. If it cannot answer, neither can your customers.