Financial Advisers:

Your practice is changed, perhaps forever - just like the rest of the world.

Now everyone is forced to work from home and online, including financial advisers.

There is a massive urgency for financial advice amidst the COVID-19 outbreak and its inevitable aftermath. The anxiety-inducing isolation and the ensuing financial meltdown begs for answers from experts, who are in short supply.

COVID-19 has become a major catalyst for advisers to rapidly adopt new digital methods of engagement and servicing, which are likely to become the new norm.

For years, financial advisory thought-leaders have been trying to prepare advisers for technological and demographic changes. With self-isolation being a new way of life, the move to digital is no longer an option, it’s essential.

Can you guide your clients through this difficult and disruptive time?

Most financial advisers are being flooded with panicked clients who struggle to maintain confidence without regular face-to-face guidance. Advisers must be able to reassure their clients, guide them through these difficult times, maintain trust, and do it all as cost-effectively and efficiently as possible.

Phone calls and emails simply do not put clients at ease, and while video conferencing works, it can’t allow the adviser to demonstrate scenarios and choose alternative actions with the client effectively.

With concerns of losing homes, jobs or 50% of their retirement funds, clients in this situation don’t want delayed backroom calculations and delayed responses to urgent questions.

Clients need to know the best way to protect what money they have in a time when nobody can predict how anything is going to play out. If an adviser cannot demonstrate to clients the best actions to meet the economic crisis in person, then how does he plan to provide a new action plan? This travel lockdown is impacting the whole world. When it’s over, your clients will be used to online meetings. In fact, many will find them far more convenient.

Can you rapidly remodel and update your client’s plans in this period of change?

Financial advisers and their clients need modelling software that can allow easy online (as well as face-to-face) demonstration of any scenario.

They want to see changes to the plan immediately.

Using the right software advisers can provide now, and in the future, more online financial advice.

What if you could model any changing scenario, demonstrate how this plays out to your client and how the change affects every aspect of their finances? What if you could rejig an entire plan with a single click? With the right software, it would not be too difficult to service and calm your anxious clients.

Can you embrace new business models and pricing?

If your time taken to review and communicate with an existing client is greatly reduced, you could afford to charge less, which may greatly assist your now less wealthy client base.

If you could rapidly fully assess a potential new client’s finances in order to answer one or two questions, you may extend your services to the average Mom and Pop either online or face to face. You could then supply scaled advice with best interest duties covered and build a totally new clientele.

In time, these clients will grow their wealth or inherit it and likely become full-service clients.

How do you Attract a Millennial Client?

Any good advertising strategist will tell you the magic to the sauce is delivering what the client wants, not what you think they want. This is true for the millennial consumer at every level. As the largest demographic today, they require brands and services to offer personalisation and make them feel special.

Millennials want everything online at their convenience.

Office consultations are inconvenient. Waiting for a plan is inconvenient. In fact, waiting, in general, is an inconvenience. This is an impatient tech-savvy generation raised on instant gratification. With their finances, they will do their own research in order to feel partly in control of the planning process. Behavioural research conducted on Millennials suggests that engaging in co-planning is the best approach to winning this massive market.

They mostly want piecemeal or scaled advice, but they will in the not too distant future be your full-service clients. They don’t want to do two or three trips to an office to meet with their financial planner. If everything else is online, why should the planning process be any different?

Can you adapt your practice during this lockdown?

Advisers should be learning and using online advice tools during the lockdown. It was only a matter of time before this change had to happen. This is the perfect time for advisers to evaluate their current business model and look to new ways of doing business.

This is the time to build new relationships and consolidate the relationship you have with your existing clients.

Use your time to embrace new technology, especially those that will solve major problems and set your practice up for the future.

The world has changed. Everything is moving online. A total rethink for the digital age is here. The time to embrace online technology is now.

Let Financial Mappers show you how.

Reach out, to set up a demo.