Why we ask you to review us (and why it matters more than you might think)

A few weeks ago I needed an appliance engineer: my freezer was  making an alarming noise. I spent ages reading reviews on three different sites – star ratings, the negative ones twice, working out who actually turned up on time and who explained things properly – before I picked up the phone. By the time I called, I felt like I half-knew them.

I doubt I'm alone. It's how most of us now find people we're going to trust with something important.

It's also exactly why we use VouchedFor.

On Saturday 21 March, the VouchedFor 2026 Top Rated Financial Adviser Guide came out as a supplement in The Times. It'll appear again in The Telegraph in June. Ginkgo is named as a Top Rated firm, and all three of our advisers – Daren, Catriona and Rachael – are listed individually too. Our score sits at 4.9 out of 5, from 367 verified reviews. And Daren is even quoted in the editorial, talking about the new inheritance tax reality for “accidental millionaires”. (You can read the guide and his article at VouchedFor 2026 Top Rated Adviser Guide)

But the badge isn't really the story. What sits behind it is.

What VouchedFor actually is

It's not a free-for-all review site like Trustpilot. VouchedFor is owned by Fintel – the same group that owns Defaqto, the financial product ratings business many of you will recognise from your policy paperwork. Every adviser on it has to be FCA registered and individually verified. Their qualifications are checked. Their fees are published. And every single review is tied to a real, named, verified client.

That's the bit that matters. If anyone could leave a review – or if we could quietly delete the ones we didn't fancy – none of it would be worth the screen it's printed on.

So when do we ask?

We ask for a review at three points along your journey, each doing a different job.

After your first consultation. This one feeds your public review on VouchedFor. It tells the next person looking for a financial adviser what it felt like the first time you spoke to one of our advisers. Did we listen? Were we clear? Did we understand what mattered to you? It's the closest thing to the personal recommendation people used to swap over coffee - just at scale.

After your first piece of business. This time we ask the public-facing questions and a deeper set besides. How was the advice? The service? Did we explain things in a way that actually made sense? Did we deliver what we said we would?

After every annual review. Same deeper questions, repeated yearly. Because a relationship that started well doesn't necessarily stay well unless you keep checking.

The second and third together are our client survey. They tell us where we're getting it right, where we could do better, and how we measure up against industry averages.

We also ask clients to leave us Google reviews. They're more freeform – usually just a few sentences about Ginkgo as a firm – and they do a different job. The structured VouchedFor questions are a measurement tool; Google reviews are simpler: would you say a few words about us in your own? Both matter. They tell us different things.

Why we can't game it

We can't (and wouldn’t!) make you leave a review. We can't see it before you submit it. We can't edit it, soften it, or take it down if we don't like it.

If we could do any of those things, none of this would mean anything.

When feedback flags an issue, we look at it carefully and decide what action to take. Then we come back to you and tell you what we've done about it. VouchedFor watches all of that, alongside the scores.

What does Top Rated really mean?

Only 167 firms across the UK qualified as Top Rated this year. Most are big national networks – twenty, thirty, fifty advisers under one roof. Small, independent, locally-rooted firms (three advisers, family-run, the same faces year after year) are genuinely in the minority. In our patch of South East London, you can count firms like ours on one hand.

So making the cut four years running is something we’re really proud of. But we couldn’t do it without your feedback. It really does help. It helps the next person find an adviser they can trust. It helps us see ourselves through your eyes. And it keeps us honest – which, in our line of work, is exactly the kind of accountability we want.

Debra Blundell Co-Founder, Ginkgo Financial