Scottish Financial Planning firm Calton’s support network Evergreen has signed up its first group of self-employed Financial Planners.

Six planners, from a diversity of financial services backgrounds and different careers, have joined so far.

Calton said four are working towards CAS, two are brand new to the profession, while three have decades of combined experience in non-advisory roles in financial services.

The cohort comprises financial coach Leticia Fonseca, wine business owner Simon Lloyd, former banker James McHugh, Bex Welthy, Matthew Starr and Jan Mosalski.

Clockwise from top left: Leticia Fonseca, Simon Lloyd, James McHugh, Bex Welthy, Matthew Starr, Jan Mosalski.

Leticia Fonseca founded her financial coaching business seven years ago. She said: “The foundations of a successful partnership are shared values, a shared sense of purpose and, importantly, a shared ambition to do things exceptionally well. I’m looking forward to learning from my peers while growing my business.”

Simon Lloyd ran his own wine business for more than 20 years, before changing career in midlife to become a Financial Planner. He said: “I wanted to be part of something which shared my values and reflected why I had chosen to become involved in financial advice in the first place.”

Former banker James McHugh said: “As a career-changer I didn’t feel that a lot of the avenues into the industry suited my ambitions, with limited options to achieving CAS being one of the main hurdles. Evergreen has recognised this as an issue and confronted it head on.’”

Simon Lloyd said he was “attracted by Evergreen’s adoption of Pilot as a CRM system, as well as their choice of Fundment as platform and Aspen for MPS – as a self-employed adviser with no admin support these offer me all I need.”

Bex Welthy is an adviser with 10 years’ experience who is striking out for the first time as self-employed adviser while earning a counselling qualification. She intends to focus her practice on delivering extra support for vulnerable clients.

She said: “I decided on Evergreen because I like how their process is streamlined and not over- complicated, either for me or my clients.”

The network aims to address industry pressure around adviser capacity, barriers to entry and lack of scalable career pathways.

It is led by Hayley Rabbets along with Calton’s founder and CEO, Tom Ham, who founded the Financial Planning and investment management firm, in 2021.

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