With so many financial advisors and specialists out there, it is crucial to add maximum value to your clients. This means stepping away from relying solely on traditional solutions and finding new ways to bring advisor value to your financial planning.
Financial planning is all about offering an extra service that not all advisors provide. This is more than just an investment-based approach. Rather, you can offer a wider range of planning services, saving options, budgeting advice, and more. Furthermore, it’s a service that many potential and current clients are seeking.
Let’s explore some ways in which financial planning can add additional advisor value.
Benefits of Providing a Financial Planning Service
From an advisor’s point of view, financial planning’s greatest benefit is its competitive advantage it provides. According to Cerulli, only 24% of financial planners actually offer planning services. However, 50% of financial advisors say that they can assist in this regard.
Understanding and truly providing financial planning services can set you apart from the other wealth manager out there. By doing so, your firm or individual practice can open up their services to a more holistic approach to fund management. This means that a greater range of services can be offered that therefore increase your potential to onboard new clients.
Instead of being concerned primarily with investments and asset management strategies, taking individual situations and unique problems into consideration can be very profitable for your business.
When people enter certain situations in their lives, financial advisors can offer various services to help. Some examples of these situations include divorce, unemployment, buying property, inheritances, or critical illnesses. Financial advisors can offer insurance, health insurance, and various other services and advice that can help these issues.
For your clients, you can add more value to their lives, but it can also result in extended business for the financial planner. This allows you to build a stronger relationship with the client – something that can last the course of their lives.
Offering a financial planning service allows you to create lasting solutions to your client’s needs. In short, this service covers a 360-degree spectrum of asset management, planning, saving, and solutions based on preparing one for the future.
Steps to Achieve Financial Planning Success
There are many different approaches to take when it comes to financial planning. Many clients immediately jump to ideas of retirement when thinking about these services. However, this is an area that extends beyond that. In order to be as successful as possible in your endeavors to provide value to your clients, certain considerations should be taken.
Create Goals
Identifying your client’s goals is the first step towards a successful financial plan. The main focus here would be retirement savings, but there are a number of other important areas to consider. These can include managing debts, creating emergency funds, healthcare, college savings, saving for a home, etc.
Creating goals can be thought of as drawing out your financial roadmap. This will help you to understand where you need to go, which routes need attention, and how you will get there. It will also help map out investment goals and strategies that are suitable for your client, if applicable.
Understand All the Information
Once you have goals and a direction to take, you will need to gather data from the client. This is to understand what the client is starting out with, and exactly what they have available for future success. This can include gathering information on income, expenses, and savings.
Getting complete transparency between a financial advisor and the client is not always the easiest thing to achieve, but it is completely necessary for a successful future. Financial advisors will need to know about all existing accounts and assets that the client has available. This will help to structure an informed and realistic plan.
Failing to receive and analyze your client’s historic data can not only be detrimental to their financial plan, but it can also taint the relationship. As a result, we highly recommend investing in a lengthy vetting process.
Risk Assessment
While you’re taking your client’s past into consideration, you have to look at their risk profile too. A risk tolerance assessment will help to understand the best options and strategies available for the client. This means understanding the best investment strategies to take, and creating realistic forecasts and financial projections.
By conducting a risk assessment, you are able to have a firmer control on threats to your client’s capital, earnings, and savings. Financial threats that you should look out for include:
- financial uncertainty
- strategic management errors
- legal liabilities
- accidents
- natural disaster
Visualize the Process
Visualization can be an extremely powerful tool when it comes to presenting your plan to your client. We suggest putting together asset allocation graphs and predictions based on all of your client’s data and to update them regularly. This will allow the client to understand and visualize a realistic potential future and help them to make the best-informed decisions.
Furthermore, visualizing the process can be beneficial when it comes to understanding how to reach goals and the kind of road that is needed to achieve this success. Updating them frequently will also provide a clear benchmark of your success or weak points.
Identify Action Steps
Now that you know what you have to work with, you understand the client’s goals and have a clear visualization of the process, it’s time to take action. Find the steps necessary to turn these goals into reality, and make it happen.
There are a number of tools available to help get your client on track and achieving their goals. Consider certain fintech solutions such as our Pivolt system, and set a plan. Monitoring the process from this point is also key.
How Britech Can Help You
Conducting thorough reports and staying on top of client demands can be time-consuming. This is why having a SaaS platform that supports your business and financial planning services is essential. With Britech’s Pivolt system, let us take care of your reporting and help you meet your financial goals.