By the very nature of their work, financial advisors are promising to deliver value to their clients through their work. It follows that advisors want to increase that value proposition in order to differentiate themselves from the competition.
How to do that becomes the primary question.
Mark Schoenbeck, executive vice president and national sales director at Kestra Financial, a financial services firm based in Austin, said advisors need to learn to manage clients’ identity and time as well as their assets.
Scott Cohen, principal, founder and CEO of CD Wealth Management, a Kestra-affiliated financial services firm based in Dallas, said advisors need to prepare clients for longevity, even if it means having brutally honest conversations.
Both executives’ goal is to deepen relationships in order to create loyal clients and to serve them well.
“In order to add value to the advisors’ relationships, we are working to move them beyond monetary asset management,” Schoenbeck said in a recent interview with Financial Advisor magazine. That move includes working with clients to secure their identities and save them time.
Safeguarding the client’s identity cuts both ways, he said. The advisor has to make sure the firm’s information is secure and then he or she needs to help the client secure his own information.
Advisors now have access to information vaults that enable information and documents to be passed back and forth in a secure digital environment. It also allows clients to see their aggregated assets on one site.
“Instead of mailing important documents or even delivering them in a shoebox, sensitive material can now be downloaded and sent securely to a vault,” he said. “If the client feels the transactions are safe it deepens the relationship with the advisor and adds value to the services he provides.”
The second step is to make sure the client is using the resources available to safeguard his information. Digital tools now exist to easily manage passwords so they can be unique.