How can you check whether a wealth adviser is trustworthy?

Engaging a wealth adviser can be a decisive step in structuring your investments, preparing for retirement or organising the transfer of your wealth.

However, professionals who present themselves as wealth advisers do not necessarily all have the same skillsor regulatory authorisations. Before entrusting a professional with the analysis of your financial situation, it is therefore essential to check their trustworthiness and regulatory framework.

The practice of wealth management is governed by several professional statuses. An adviser may operate in different areas: financial investment advice, insurance product distribution, banking intermediation or property advice. Each of these activities requires specific authorisations and registration in official registers. Checking these details is the first step in establishing an adviser’s credibility.

Contents

Check registration with ORIAS

Most wealth advisers operate under one or more regulated statuses. These statuses must be declared toORIAS (the French body responsible for the single register of insurance, banking and finance intermediaries).

ORIAS maintains a public register that allows you to check whether a professional has the authorisations needed to carry out certain activities. The most common statuses among wealth advisers include:

• CIF: Financial investment adviser

• IAS: Insurance intermediary

• IOBSP: Intermediary in banking transactions and payment services

• Estate agent or property intermediary

A professional working in one of these areas must be registered. Registration means they meet a number of obligations, particularly concerning training, professional indemnity insurance and membership of a professional association when practising as a CIF.

Check the company’s existence with INSEE

Beyond regulatory statuses, it is also important to check the legal existence of the firm or company offering wealth management services.

Every French business has a SIREN number and a SIRET number issued byINSEE. These identifiers confirm that the company is registered and still active. This check also helps establish that the business has not been struck off, dissolved or placed into liquidation.

This step is often overlooked, yet it is a simple but essential way to verify that an advisory firm genuinely exists.

Before you begin, it is essential to understand how much an adviser actually costs.
👉 View wealth advisers’ fees

Check authorisations for financial advice

Some advisers also provide financial investment advice. In this case, they may be subject to the status of CIF, which notably requires membership of a professional association approved by the French financial markets authority (AMF).

This status imposes several obligations: compliance with conduct rules, transparency about remuneration, analysis of the client’s investor profile and formal documentation of the advice. It therefore provides an important regulatory framework for protecting investors.

An adviser working in financial markets must be able to clearly demonstrate these authorisations.

Transparency about activities and remuneration

A reputable adviser must also be transparent about several essential matters:

• the statuses under which they operate

• the products they can offer

• how they are paid

• the partners they work with

Some advisers charge advisory fees, while others are paid by the financial institutions whose products they distribute. In practice, many firms combine both remuneration methods. What matters is that these arrangements are clearly explained to the client before any investment recommendation is made.

Check that a financial guarantee exists

Another important point to check is the existence of a financial guarantee. This guarantee is compulsory for certain professionals who handle funds on behalf of their clients, particularly in banking, insurance or property intermediation. It aims to protect clients if the professional can no longer return the money entrusted to them.

In practical terms, this guarantee is issued by a financial institution or insurance company that undertakes to cover the funds held by the professional in the course of their work. It therefore provides additional protection for investors if the firm fails or an incident occurs in the management of cash flows.

Although not all wealth advisers are subject to this obligation, where it applies it represents an important safeguard. Checking the existence of a financial guarantee and the identity of the body issuing it therefore provides a more complete picture of the protection offered by the professional.

Checking the professional property licence (carte T)

Some professionals listed in the directory also carry out property transactions. For this activity, they must hold a professional property licence, commonly known as a carte T, issued by the French Chambers of Commerce and Industry (CCI).

When this activity is declared on the profile, we check the existence and validity of the carte T using public information provided by the competent authorities. This check confirms that the professional is authorised to carry out transactions involving property and business goodwill in accordance with current regulations.

Visitors can also consult the official register of property professionals provided by the CCI directly to check the validity of a professional licence. Information in the directory can therefore be cross-checked against official data published by the authorities.

This check adds a further layer of transparency for professionals working in property wealth management, rental investment or property transactions.

Checks carried out by the Experts du Patrimoine website

To strengthen transparency in the sector, the Experts du Patrimoine website regularly checks firms listed in its directory.

Every week, several checks are performed automatically on company profiles in the directory:

• checking that the company exists in the official INSEE database;
• checking that at least one active authorisation or status is registered with ORIAS or a regulatory authority such as the AMF;
• checking the validity of the professional property licence, the carte T, when required by the declared activity;
• checking the consistency of the regulatory information displayed on the profile;
• detecting any removals from registers, business closures or publicly recorded administrative changes;
• checking the presence and validity of the main regulatory identifiers, including SIREN, ORIAS and professional licence numbers.

These automated checks are supplemented by occasional manual checks to maintain a high level of reliability and quality in the information published in the directory.

When this information can no longer be confirmed, the firm’s profile is clearly marked as struck off to inform users of the change in its regulatory situation.

These regular checks help keep the directory up to date and give investors an initial indication of the regulatory status of the professionals listed.

Find a wealth adviser

Checking a professional’s regulatory status is an essential step before working together. It helps establish that the adviser operates within a legal framework and complies with the obligations imposed by regulatory authorities.

To make this research easier, thewebsite directory of Experts du Patrimoine helps you identify numerous wealth advisory firms and advisers in France, while providing the available regulatory information on each profile.

This transparency helps strengthen trust between investors and wealth advisory professionals in a field where the quality of guidance and legal certainty are essential.