Good question
The first point is to insist on a clean zero commission contract and pay a fee for advice instead.
However be warned, you are right to be wary since enhanced initial allocations still come with strings attached ie higher annual management costs AND early surrender penalties typically locking you in for 5 years.
You are correct in your assessment commissions are an inducement to sell products and therefore by definition the impartiality of the advice process is compromised.
My clients only invest in funds and products that do not pay commissions and therefore have lower fees. But because these funds cannot pay commissions, they do not feature on the radar of most advisers despite the fact that if they are an authorised adviser they are required by the central bank to conduct a "fair analysis" of the market. Some of the main low cost fund management groups in the world base their European operations in Dublin yet few Irish investors have ever even heard of I shares or Vanguard or Dimensional. Why? They don't pay commissions to intermediaries. In the main that is all many advisers are really doing - intermediation. Most advisers are even happy to be described as "brokers".
In my opinion by restricting recommendations mainly to products which can pay commissions, even if they take a reduced or even nil commission, the adviser is failing in their primary duty to their clients which as you correctly point out is to be impartial.
Equally, many if not most advisers still sell products based on past performance despite two clear facts
1) The Central Bank of Ireland requires a form of warning to the effect that past performance is no guarantee of future returns
2) the only proven predictor of how well a fund should perform relative to its peers is the cost. Higher charges equals greater probability the fund will stink
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