This premier virtual wholesale market, as we envision, is where advisors through the general community or through a white-labeled wealth management community, tailored for their respective firm, can access all the meaningful asset manager content, insights, thought leadership and investment product information. Separately, asset management sales teams can search for advisors and identify their engagement preferences and needs. The detailed profiles provided by every member of the FLX community allow them to share interests, career experience, product needs, service needs and desired form of engagement (i.e., phone, in-person, email, etc.). The benefit is to simplify, personalize and customize the engagement experience.
Hortz: Any recommendations on how financial firms can reinvigorate themselves in platforms and being part of a network?
Spina: Yes, while there are many options, a couple of concepts repeatedly reveal themselves to us as competitive drivers.
We have been talking about creating “synthetic scale” as a way to reinvigorate or better compete. Scale has been a driving objective for many in the asset and wealth space. As a select group of firms have achieved that goal and accumulated massive scale, it’s made it more challenging for others to compete. By joining a community and leveraging the shared Solutions and buying power of the community, firms or even business units can forge a path to growth.
We have also encouraged firms to experiment. While well worn, the expression that “doing things the same way and expecting different results” is still very much an operating belief of many firms. Whether it’s a large experiment or small one, we see significant value in trying new approaches. This can run across an entire business, a subset, a product type, a channel, a geography, or some combination thereof. The opportunity to experiment abounds.
The Institute for Innovation Development is an educational and business development catalyst for growth-oriented financial advisors and financial services firms determined to lead their businesses in an operating environment of accelerating business and cultural change. We position our members with the necessary ongoing innovation resources and best practices to drive and facilitate their next-generation growth, differentiation and unique community engagement strategies. The institute was launched with the support and foresight of our founding sponsors—Ultimus Fund Solutions, NASDAQ, FLX Networks, Pershing, Fidelity, Voya Financial, Advisorpedia and Charter Financial Publishing (publisher of Financial Advisor magazine).