The Investment Funds Institute of Canada (IFIC) has released two checklists to help advisors working with senior clients.

IFIC published the two checklists earlier this week. One deals with cognitive decline and the other with financial exploitation; both were developed by the organisation’s new task force on vulnerable clients.

Regulatory and legal obligations

The two documents discuss how advisors can prepare to work with potentially vulnerable investors, what they should watch for when advising these clients, and what they can do to meet their regulatory and legal obligations. IFIC says this is just the first in a series of tools on cognitive decline and financial exploitation that the task force is developing.

"From an advisor perspective, the keys to supporting vulnerable investors, like seniors, lie in demonstrating good awareness of the individual's abilities, relationships and wishes from an early stage in the advisor-client relationship, and to include discussions about the potential for cognitive decline in regular client conversations," says Jan Dymond, IFIC’s vice president of public affairs and chair of the Vulnerable Investors Task Force.