The Top 5 Tips to Helping Clients Understand Your Advice
As we navigate our way through transitional licensing and the new legislation, a major focus has been on making sure that clients understand the financial advice they are given, which brings us to the question “what do you do to help your clients understand?”. We put this question to some of our adviser clients and here’s what they came up with…
1: Visuals are king. Research has proven that we ingest more quickly and retain information better with images as opposed to words. Humans are visual creatures, when you look at pages of text with no pictures there’s little chance you’ll actually sit down and read it.
2: Provide clear and balanced comparisons of existing and new products. If you are comparing apples with pears how can the client get it?
3: Try not to use industry jargon that the client will not understand. Keep it in plain English – you may have a tertiary education in finance but most likely the client doesn’t. Which leads to our next tip…
4: Consider the client’s level of education in finance matters; a younger couple may not be as financially savvy not having been round the block as many times.
5: Talk through your recommendations with your clients. It may come as a shock but not everyone will sit down and read your 50-page SOA to the end. So, having a face to face to explain why you think your recommendations are right for the client is so important.
Still wondering how this might work for you? Head on over and check out our engagement / modelling tools…
Ewen Cameron – Financial Advisor / Product Specialist
Become More Effective with FinTech
The term fintech refers to technology that enables parts of the financial services world to be automated. For advisers, it means using software to digitise and automate such tasks as portfolio rebalancing, data aggregation and keeping tabs on the particulars of each client’s financial situation. The result – less time spent crunching numbers, entering data and analysing spreadsheets and more time to connect and better understand clients.
Technology is rapidly changing the way clients engage – software can visually give clients a picture of their financial position with automated charts and scenarios. It also allows advisors to visually show clients comparisons between providers.
Advisers have found that digital advances have increased their ability to both serve clients and increase their client base. Fintech has created more time to advise clients, more time to discuss things like… starting a business, home reno projects, rental properties and just life in general. Fintech has also freed up time to enable a higher client to advisor ratio and therefore a more efficiently run business. So efficient we can even advise without the need to do anything – Roboadvice.
So, have we reached a position where the adviser will become obsolete? While this Fintech is increasingly more important, it remains that advisors are the key part of the financial services ecosystem. There are still things that a computer algorithm can’t advise on, there is definitely value in the human financial advisor.
Why not technology? These days we see technology everywhere, its an everyday thing and we now tend to notice when its not there rather than when it is. The financial services industry must continue to adapt and implement technology, it is important to incorporate both digital and human interaction to best serve clients.
Ewen Cameron – Financial Adviser / Product Specialist
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