Communicating the value financial advice provides for clients will be a more significant factor for practitioner success in the immediate future as has been experienced in the United Kingdom advisory sector recently, the head of a research house has predicted.
“[Advisers in the UK] are doing a very powerful job of anchoring the value which they create. We’ve fumbled this away routinely as an industry. The advisers I know, and I work with, are creating extraordinary value for their clients, but we routinely don’t talk about it,” CoreData principal Andrew Inwood told delegates at the AFA (Association of Financial Advisers) Hybrid Conference 2021 today.
“We have to find a way to remind the people that we are working for that every quarter we’ve added value to their process and the relationship.”
To this end, Inwood said it is now the responsibility of advisers to actually publish this fact in order to embed the value of financial advice provided into the client’s consciousness.
According to Inwood, another change in the approach practitioners should adopt if the UK experience is to be drawn upon is to place more emphasis on building their brand.
“[This involves] giving people an emotive reason to choose [you]. The rest of the world is a long way ahead in this process,” he said.
From a behavioural perspective, this shift in focus will allow advisers to engage with a greater number of clients than can usually be expected, he pointed out.
“We have to create a brand that pulls people to us. Every other industry has done that and people can talk very clearly why they have a brand affiliation with BMW or Audi or Volvo, but often it’s hard for the industry as a whole [to establish this connection] and we need to get beyond that and get beyond that quite quickly,” he said.
Better use of technology must also be adopted as a pathway to success as it will allow practitioners to establish more efficient processes, he advised.
