Nerd's Eye View Archives On Financial Advisor Conferences

Highlights From The Advise AI Conference 2024

November 18, 2024 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

In recent years, AI has become an increasingly common feature in advisor technology. The possibilities at the intersection of AI and financial advice are exciting – faster processes, better connections, less time on ‘busy work’ – but also come with uncertainty about the future of the field. What might the field of financial advice even look like in 10 years? Yet, there are still notable gaps between the potential of AI-enhanced technology and its current capabilities.

In this guest post, Craig Iskowitz, CEO and founder of Ezra Group, shares highlights from this year’s Advise AI Conference, where industry leaders gathered to explore how AI might shape financial advice, from back-office operations to client interactions. Rather than focusing on the fear that AI might replace advisors, a key theme was how advisors could work alongside AI to deliver more effective, timely, and personalized insights to clients. For example, while some speakers discussed how AI leverages data at scale, others, like Sindhu Joseph of CogniCor, highlighted how the platform identified life events and changes (such as the birth of a child) to prompt timely, personalized advisor outreach.

Another conference theme centered on how advisors could effectively vet new advisor technology products. A panel of industry leaders recommended examining not only the feasibility of implementation but also critical factors like data safety, privacy, and compatibility with existing systems. Once vetted, new technology can be implemented gradually, focusing first on a few high-impact tasks that directly enhance advisor productivity.

Other key highlights from the Advise AI Conference included:

Personalized Client Experiences: Multiple vendors, including Andrew Smith Lewis of Alai Studios, discussed how AI can enhance – not replace – personalization of client experiences with tools like AI companions (e.g., Lydia) that remember both advisor personalities and client interactions.
Measuring AI ROI: Andrew Altfest, CEO of FP Alpha, shared insights on shifting AI from back-office support to client-facing tasks, such as portfolio construction and new client onboarding, to enhance measurable outcomes.
AI For Marketing: Susan Theder, Chief Marketing and Experience Officer at FMG, shared how AI could be trained to capture an advisor’s unique voice, enabling marketing efforts that feel more authentic and personalized.
Leadership's Role In AI Success: Brooke Juniper, CEO of Tifin Sage, emphasized that firm leaders can foster successful AI adoption by promoting a culture of experimentation and learning.

Throughout the Advise AI Conference, speakers highlighted the importance of each stage in the AI integration journey. With well-designed interfaces and thoughtful integration, AI tools can be implemented across advisory firms, enhancing both back-office and client-facing workflows. With support from firm leadership, advisors can iterate on these tools to continuously improve efficiency and service quality, ultimately benefiting clients through smoother onboarding processes and clearer action steps.

Ultimately, the Advise AI Conference emphasized that while AI technology is still in its early stages, its potential to transform advisory firms is undeniable. With a flexible approach and a balance between technology and the human touch, AI is poised to elevate the way advisory firms serve clients – for the better!

The 18 Best Financial Advisor Conferences To Attend In 2025

October 28, 2024 07:01 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

Financial advisor conferences are not what they used to be. Once the domain of membership associations that, especially amongst independent financial advisors, created a central space for networking and community, conferences were primarily built around professional development (i.e., continuing education) and often held a space for the vendors who served those advisors, with organizations like the Financial Planning Association convening the largest conferences for financial advisors.

But over the past 20 years, the shift from commission-based to recurring revenue (AUM and subscription fee) models has, for the first time, allowed advisory firms to begin to size and scale up. What was primarily an industry of eat-what-you-kill solo financial advisors and their administrative staff has increasingly evolved into multi-advisor firms with a wider base of support staff, and increasingly specialized roles within the advisory firms as staged career tracks emerge, departments form, and greater levels of complexity develop.

As a result of this increasing role specialization within advisory firms, conferences for financial advisors have also become increasingly specialized over the past decade. Broad-based conferences that simply convened advisors because they were engaged in financial planning or operating as independents have given way to a plethora of more targeted events, from conferences 'just' on tax planning to events focused on advisor technology, to those hyper-targeting financial advisors at certain stages of business who are seeking peers of the exact same size to discuss best practices about how to deal with their business complexities. These discussions can range from talent development and succession planning to how to systematize and scale their marketing alongside their planning and investment services.

Consequently, the irony is that there seem to be even more conferences for financial advisors today than there were a decade ago (when many lamented that there were 'too many' conferences to choose from!). However, the good and bad news of this evolution is that because conferences are more specialized than ever, there's even more opportunity to get value out of a 'good-fit' conference… and it's even more of a waste of time to go to an event that is not a good fit for the advisor's needs and circumstances!

As someone who has been speaking at 50–70 conferences a year for 20 years myself, I've seen the good and bad of our wide range of industry events, from the industry associations to the broker-dealers and insurance companies and RIA custodians, the rise of vendor conferences and media-driven events, private company events, and more. As a result, I am often asked for my own suggestions of what, really, are the industry's 'best' conferences to attend, and back in 2012, I started to craft my own annual list of 'best-in-class' top conferences for financial advisors.

Having updated our annual conference list every year since, I'm excited now to present my newest list of "Top Financial Advisor Conferences" for the upcoming 2025 year, with a particular focus on highlighting how advisors can find the 'right' conference that fits their interests and business needs, from events on advisor technology (and one dedicated specifically to AI!), to conferences on marketing, learning business development skills, or developing next generation talent, to the top events for those who still use conferences to up their technical game in areas like tax planning. Plus a few events that are simply great well-rounded experiences for those who want to enjoy the conference, the destination, the sessions they attend, and their fellow attendees.

In addition, we've also updated our popular "Master Conference List" for all financial advisor conferences we could find for 2025, both for advisors looking for a wider range of events to attend (if you want to delve deeper into a particular topical area) and for vendors looking for more conferences to exhibit at! (And as more conferences are announced in the coming months, we'll continue to update the Master Conference List well into the coming year!).

So I hope you'll find this year's 2025 top conferences list (and our updated Master Conference List) to be helpful as a guide in planning your own conference budget and schedule for next year, and be certain to take advantage of the special discount codes that several conferences have offered to all of you as Nerd's Eye View readers!

Highlights From The 2024 T3 Advisor Conference

February 19, 2024 07:03 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

The 2024 Technology Tools for Today (T3) Advisor Conference, held last month in Las Vegas, Nevada, featured a large gathering of financial advisors and representatives from across the fintech industry. Hosted by Joel Bruckenstein and his team from T3 Consulting, the conference focused heavily on the relationship between financial advice and its accompanying fintech, covering everything from how AI and other tech developments are changing the advisor landscape in unprecedented ways to the importance of stringent cybersecurity measures, tech-stack integrations that actually work together cohesively and seamlessly, and the value of retaining the human essence in a wealth management landscape that is constantly moving forward.

In this guest post, Craig Iskowitz – CEO and founder of Ezra Group, a financial technology consulting firm – highlights this year's conference with his signature Twitter-driven recap, featuring presentations on the compelling paradox of AI; as while AI has become increasingly associated with overcoming human limitations with its efficiency, accuracy, and convenience, its weakness actually lies in its lack of humanity and inability to establish human connections. For example, Snappy Kraken emphasized how delegating tasks to AI tools can increase efficiency beyond what advisors can do on their own, and TradePMR shared their own (surprising) experience that their highly skilled personal concierges were actually AI bots; however, both companies conceded that technology can only go so far without a human relationship acting as the 'engine' for all of these (automated) pieces.

A continual thread through the conference was the ongoing effort to build a truly cohesive tech stack. In the wake of an AdvisorTech boom over the last decade, many advisors have all the tools they need to build truly comprehensive solutions for their clients. However, as Pershing Wove's Ainslie Simmonds points out, 65% of affluent investors are willing to leave their advisors if they do not offer an integrated tech experience – and in fact, having interoperable tech was a key component to growth.

Other major highlights from the T3 Advisor Technology Conference included:

Several speakers, such as Craig Ramsey and Rich Cancro of Advisor Engine, emphasized how processes are quickly changing in the new face of technology, and FP Alpha emphasized that right now presents a better opportunity than ever to reexamine old practices to see what can be simplified, automated, or altered.
At the same time, Morningstar's CEO Kunal Kapoor highlighted that efficiency comes with a greater demand towards personalization, and Orion's new CEO Nataline Wolfsen also spoke of the importance of aligning technology with the human elements of trust, shared values, and personal understanding.
Apex Fintech Solutions noted that the average advisor rings in at a cool 97% retention rate for acquired clients, suggesting that net new assets may provide a clearer lens for growth than the more traditional AUM metric. In the same vein, they also highlighted that hybrid firms (i.e., those that offer both digital robo-advice and human touch) are growing faster than almost everyone else, with 24% of net new cashflows despite the low aggregate number of firms with this business model.
Of course, with digitalization, integration, and automation comes cybersecurity risks. Digital hygiene, encryption security, and good staff training can all be enormous factors in the overall safety of the company, as explained by Patrick Hennessy, Schwab's Director of Business Consulting.

Finally, the annual T3/Inside Information Software Survey, which assesses the software programs used by financial advisors, found that tax planning tools are on the rise – with adoption rates jumping from 30% to 43%. Likewise, while CRM usage has slipped by about 5%, the overall number of advisors who use a CRM still remains at a dominant 92%. And lastly, as data becomes more comprehensive in today's digital landscape, cybersecurity rises in importance – and cybersecurity tool adoption remains on a slow, but steady, rise.

Ultimately, the 2024 T3 Advisor Conference brought together advisors, leaders, vendors, and students from all across the financial advice industry to share insights on threats, changes, observations – and, of course, to examine new opportunities in a constantly shifting fintech landscape. As software providers grow in number and their offerings expand in complexity, automation and cybersecurity will be central themes as client preferences continue to change. Which means that there is plenty of space – and demand – for technology to evolve, continually helping more advisors to be better, and more successful, and also allowing for the definitions of 'better' and 'successful' to grow as our technology options do as well!

The 10 Best Financial Advisor Conferences To Attend In 2024

October 30, 2023 07:01 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

After several years of turmoil caused by the pandemic, financial advisor conferences seem to have found a "new [post-pandemic] normal", with events once again growing (some already surpassing their pre-pandemic highs). But that's not to say that the conference landscape was not altered by the pandemic; instead, the pandemic appears to have served as a catalyst that accelerated trends that were already underway, such that financial advisor conferences today look substantively different than they did just a decade ago.

Most notable is the fact that industry associations are not the drivers of advisor conferences that they once were; while a decade ago, 75%+ of this "Best Conferences" list consisted of various events run by industry associations, now it numbers less than 25%. On the other hand, the past decade has seen an explosion of 'vendor conferences', as more and more companies have discovered it's more economical to simply run their own conferences (at a breakeven or even a small loss) than to heavily sponsor the conferences of industry associations.

Some of these vendor conferences are built to bring out their existing advisor users to get feedback about and share the latest regarding their software, but a growing number of specialized conferences unto themselves have industry-leading content in the particular domain of the vendor's expertise, from Snappy Kraken and Nitrogen's advisor marketing conferences to DeVoe and Company's Elevate conference for managing the complex financial advisor enterprise.

At the same time, new conference organizers have emerged as well – entities that see gaps between what conferences vendors host (based on the software or services they sell) and what associations provide – leading to new niche conferences like Advisor2X's "Shift" conference on behavioral finance, to AdvisorCircle's "Future Proof" conference (or as some are calling it, the Future Proof Festival Experience!).

The end result from the advisor perspective, though, is not dissimilar to what it was in the past: an overwhelming number of conferences to choose from, and a great challenge for advisors in figuring out which ones are really worth attending and sinking what is often more than $2,000 (in registration fees, hotels, and airfare), plus several days out of the office, in the hopes that it will prove to be a good use of time.

As someone who has been speaking at 50–70 conferences a year for 18 years myself, I've seen the good and bad of our wide range of industry events, from the industry associations to the broker-dealers and insurance companies and RIA custodians, the rise of vendor conferences and media-driven events, private company events, and more. As a result, I am often asked for my own suggestions of what, really, are the industry's 'best' conferences to attend.

Accordingly, back in 2012, I started to craft my own annual list of 'best-in-class' top conferences for financial advisors, allocated across a range of different categories (as what's best for solo advisors isn't the same as what's best for larger advisor enterprises, what's best for fee-for-service advisors isn't the same as what's best for AUM firms, more technically-oriented advisors will prefer different conferences than those seeking practice management or marketing ideas, etc.).

Having updated our annual conference list every year since, I'm excited now to present my newest list of "Top Financial Advisor Conferences" for the upcoming 2024 year, with a particular focus on parsing through both the industry association events, the growing number of vendor and standalone conference providers… with our usual approach of parsing out the 'best' conference for a wide range of advisors with unique needs, from those who are looking for a conference on marketing or practice management (which varies depending on whether you're a mid-sized firm or larger enterprise), or who want to see the latest in advisor technology, need help in how to price financial planning fees and systematize their advice offering, are simply looking for a good overall conference or particular advanced tax and technical conference… or just want an entirely different conference experience (for which Future Proof stands alone!).

In addition, we've also updated our popular "Master Conference List" of all financial advisor conferences in 2024, both for advisors looking for a wider range of events to attend (if you want to delve deeper into a particular topical area), and for vendors looking for more conferences to exhibit at!

So I hope you'll find this year's 2024 top conferences list (and our updated Master Conference List) to be helpful as a guide in planning your own conference budget and schedule for next year, and be certain to take advantage of the special discount codes that several conferences have offered to all of you as Nerd's Eye View readers!

Highlights From The 2023 T3 Advisor Conference

April 10, 2023 07:07 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

The 2023 Technology Tools for Today (T3) Advisor Conference, held last month in Tampa, Florida, featured a large gathering of financial advisors and representatives across the fintech industry attending the 2½-day conference. Hosted by Joel Bruckenstein and his team from T3 Consulting, the conference covered everything from how technology providers are continuing to expand their features and integration capabilities to how advisors can manage their own expanding tech stacks to the ever-present question of how AI tools like ChatGPT will impact the advisory industry.

In this guest post, Craig Iskowitz – CEO and founder of Ezra Group, a financial technology consulting firm – summarizes this year’s conference highlights with his signature Twitter-driven recap, kicking off with presentation highlights from financial planning software platform MoneyGuide, which announced its own version of the increasingly popular “one-page financial plan”, reflecting the greater demand from advisors to streamline printed plan materials. Additionally, MoneyGuide rolled out a new "Plan Pulse" dashboard allowing advisory firms to look across all of their clients’ plans and identify those who have fallen behind.

Another ongoing theme of the conference, which has persisted for several years, is the continuing effort to expand software integration capabilities to cover all parts of a client’s plan with no gaps caused by the failure of one tool to talk to another, and the different approaches that firms take to achieve better integration – whether they work to increase their integration with different third-party software tools (like MoneyGuide), offer a variety of products and services that can be purchased separately but integrate seamlessly with one another (like Morningstar), or combine virtually every type of technology tool into a single “growth platform” (like Riskalyze) that seeks to serve as virtually the advisor’s entire tech stack in one product!

Other major highlights from the T3 Advisor Technology Conference included:

Several speakers talked about how their firms are using AI technology, including Orion Advisor Technology President Brian McLaughlin, who discussed how advisors add value in ways that can’t be co-opted by AI and whose firm recently integrated ChatGPT into its RedTail CRM software.
The resources that advisory firms invest in new technology can be wasted if employees don’t know how (or why) to use it. As Sequoia Financial’s Chief Technology Officer Trevor Chuna discussed, a software adoption plan goes beyond just initial training and includes updates on new features, ongoing training, and regular communication to get ongoing results.
An update from Fidelity provided data suggesting that clients increasingly want support in areas beyond investment management from their financial advisors – which in turn has led advisors to invest heavily in specialized planning software to go deeper into more areas as robo-advisor technology has drastically reduced the cost of providing investment management.
An update from Schwab, amidst the final stages of its integration with TD Ameritrade (scheduled for completion before next year’s T3 conference), confirmed that TDA's thinkpipes and iRebal trading and rebalancing tools are expected to be retained and migrated over to Schwab. The Schwab executives also noted that the Schwab Advisor Center platform will incorporate many of the most popular features and functionality of the Veo advisor platform. SAC, like Veo, allows for integrations with many third-party platforms.
RIA owners who sell their firms to large RIA aggregators based on overall price alone – without fully understanding the terms of the deal – can find themselves regretting their decision, according to Dynasty Financial Partners founder Shirl Penney.

Finally, the annual T3/Inside Information Software Survey, which assesses the software programs used by financial advisors, found that almost every software category has seen greater adoption among advisors – as while advisors are increasingly offering comprehensive advice and expanding how they provide value to their clients, their tech stacks are also expanding in kind – which only reinforces the challenges of navigating and maximizing the value of numerous software tools via enhanced integration capabilities in the software platforms themselves.

Ultimately, the 2023 T3 Advisor Conference brought together vendors, industry thought leaders, financial advisors, and students to gain insight into the fast-paced growth and change of the financial planning industry and the new technology tools available to help financial planning businesses flourish. And with the expansive array of new and upcoming technology solutions, there was an increased focus – which will no doubt continue as a theme in future conferences –not just on the tools themselves but also on how to use an entire suite of technology solutions while still creating a seamless planning experience for clients!

The 9 ‘Best’ Financial Advisor Conferences (For Scaling Up) In 2023

October 17, 2022 07:06 am 2 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

After more than 2 years of ongoing disruptions, from the original COVID-19 outbreak, to wave after wave of variants as the pandemic rolled on, 2022 proved to be the year that advisor conferences were “back”, as events ceased canceling or rescheduling in response to new variants and powered forward… often with virtual options for those who still felt uncomfortable traveling, but with most events actually reaching or even exceeding their pre-pandemic highs as advisors showed that they, too, are hungry to re-connect and re-engage.

However, not all advisor conferences have recovered, and, instead, the pandemic seems to have operated as a catalyst that took ongoing shifts in the conference landscape and accelerated them. As while conferences in the past were primarily a combination of ‘trade shows’ (where advisors could see the latest products and services from the vendors who exhibited) and educational content for CE, the conferences that have been the fastest to rebound are either built around their communities that also offer education and networking (as advisors still have a desire to ‘go home’ to their communities, from RIA custodians to broker-dealers, to advisor networks and associations they’re connected with) or those that are built around practice management.

In fact, with the astonishing success of advisory firms through the pandemic – as nearly all firms held onto and still managed to grow their client count despite the disruption, and saw revenue reach new highs as AUM was largely buoyed by market growth (recent market volatility notwithstanding) – in the new conference landscape, the challenges that advisors face when trying to “scale up” through the growth have become a major focus. Leading to an expansion in various ‘niche’ conferences that specialize in particular challenges that advisors face as they follow the growth journey. Which, in turn, is spawning even more hunger for specialized practice management conferences in 2023.

As someone who has been speaking at 50-70 conferences a year for 18 years myself, I’ve seen the good and bad of our wide range of industry events, which are spread across membership associations, broker-dealers, insurance companies, RIA custodians, product manufacturers, media companies, private events, and more. And as a result, I am often asked for my own suggestions of what, really, are the industry’s ‘best’ conferences to attend.

Accordingly, back in 2012, I started to craft my own annual list of ’best-in-class’ top conferences for financial advisors, allocated across a range of different categories (as what’s best for solo advisors isn’t the same as what’s best for larger advisor enterprises, what’s best for fee-for-service advisors isn’t the same as what’s best for AUM firms, more technically-oriented advisors will prefer different conferences than those seeking practice management or marketing ideas, etc.).

Having updated our annual conference list every year since, I’m excited now to present my newest list of “Top Financial Advisor Conferences” for the upcoming 2023 year, with a particular focus on the best conferences for advisors facing various “scaling up” challenges – from solo advisors who have gotten ‘stuck’, advisors looking to transition to become a multi-advisor boutique, navigating the unique human capital and growth challenges that founders face when scaling up an enterprise, as well as the best conferences for scaling up advisor marketing, advisor technology, and the advice delivery process itself. Along with a few other notable conferences for those looking for a good overall educational experience (for those who don’t yet want to get their CE online!), those who need a ‘recharge’, and those who are just looking for something new and different (who may want to check out Future Proof’s new ‘un-conference’ wealth festival!).

In addition, we've also updated our popular "Master Conference List" of all financial advisor conferences in 2023, for both advisors looking for a wider range of events to attend (if you want to delve deeper into a particular topical area), and for vendors looking for more conferences to exhibit at!

So I hope you find this year’s 2023 top conferences list (and our new Master Conference List) to be helpful as a guide in planning your own conference budget and schedule for next year, and be certain to take advantage of the special discount codes that several conferences have offered to all of you as Nerd’s Eye View readers!

The 11 ‘Best’ Financial Advisor Conferences To Choose From In 2022

November 15, 2021 07:03 am 5 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a number of dramatic changes for the typical financial advisor, who suddenly found themselves meeting with all their clients virtually, managing their entire team virtually… and trying – usually unsuccessfully – to network with other financial advisors at virtual conferences. As in the end, while the transition to Zoom-based conferences was ‘reasonably’ successful at delivering content for advisors, it’s done very little to alleviate the sense of isolation that has come with 18+ months of a work-from-home environment and the near-total shutdown of financial advisor conferences.

And so as vaccination rates continue to rise across the country – now accelerating as age 5–11 vaccines begin to roll out – advisors are steadily returning to the office, conferences are preparing to re-open their doors for in-person events in 2022… and a lot of advisors are expressing a newfound desire to get out from their 4 walls, take a trip (or an extended vacation!), and reconnect with other financial advisors and get some fresh ideas and inspiration about ‘what’s next’ for their own advisory businesses. Which just raises one key question: if you’re going to go back out for a conference in 2022, for the first time in nearly 3 years… what’s the best conference to attend?

As someone that has been speaking at 50-70 conferences a year for almost 15 years myself, I’ve seen the good and bad of our wide range of industry events, which are spread across membership associations, broker-dealers, insurance companies, RIA custodians, product manufacturers, media companies, private events, and more. And as a result, I am often asked for my own suggestions of what, really, are the industry’s ‘best’ conferences to attend.

Accordingly, back in 2012, I started to craft my own annual list of 'best-in-class' top conferences for financial advisors, allocated across a range of different categories (as what’s best for solo advisors isn’t the same as what’s best for larger advisor enterprises, what’s best for fee-for-service advisors isn’t the same as what’s best for AUM firms, more technically oriented advisors will prefer different conferences than those seeking practice management or marketing ideas, etc.).

Having updated our annual conference list in every year since, I’m excited now to present my newest list of “Top Financial Advisor Conferences” for the upcoming 2022 year, including both some technical conferences, a wide range of practice management conferences, and highlighting a few never-before-seen events that are emerging for the first time in the coming year.

In addition, we've also launched a new "Master Conference List" of all financial advisor conferences in 2022, for both advisors looking for a wider range of events to attend, and for vendors looking for more conferences to exhibit at!

Of course, because of the disruption of the pandemic, it’s not entirely clear whether some events will show up in 2022 differently than they did the last time they were in person (which for most, was all the way back in 2019!). Nonetheless, as long as you find the conference that is the right type for you, the odds are good that your experience will be good when the content is more relevant, and the other attendees are similar to you (because they, too, were looking for the same thing!).

So I hope you find this year’s 2022 conferences list (and our new Master Conference List) to be helpful as a guide in planning your own conference budget and schedule for next year, and be certain to take advantage of the special discount codes that several conferences have offered to all of you as Nerd’s Eye View readers!
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#FA Success Ep 230: Showing Financial Planning Value As An AUM Advisor By Focusing The Conversation, With Dan Moisand

May 25, 2021 07:05 am 2 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 230^th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today’s podcast is Dan Moisand. Dan is a Principal of Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo, a fee-only RIA headquartered in Melbourne, Florida that manages over $800m in assets for 650 households.

What’s unique about Dan, though, is his ability to communicate the value and power of financial planning to clients in a straightforward and compelling manner, illustrating in the process that if an advisor really focuses their communication on the planning issues, at every meeting, then their clients will view them as a planner… regardless of how their advisory fees are structured.

In this episode, we talk in depth about why Dan feels that there’s nothing wrong with offering the “average” advisory firm services for the average advisory fee and why their firm doesn’t discount, why Dan sees the concerns about fee compression as overblown and that the AUM fee model remains a perfectly viable method of charging clients, and why the trajectory of financial planning itself shouldn’t be gauged on the outlook of technology forces trying to simplify the advisor’s value proposition, but rather on the direction of complexity of the typical consumer’s financial life… which isn’t getting any simpler these days, and is just driving even more of them to seek financial advice.

We also talk about Dan’s views on why it’s the relationships the advisors forge with their clients that ultimately matter the most (and why technology may be an invaluable tool but it’s not a competitor for advisors because it just doesn’t care about the client the way another human being does), why it’s more important to simply be of service to clients than to try to always be the smartest person in the room (especially when Dan’s clientele literally include rocket scientists from the central Florida space programs), and the way Dan structures his initial conversations with clients around assessing their confidence levels in all the different aspects of their financial lives because, as Dan puts it, the real value of financial planning at its core is helping people to become or remain confident in all those areas for the rest of their lives.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Dan discusses his firm’s recent addition of a team member who’s exclusively in charge of building out workflows, automations, and software integrations so that their financial planners can spend more time serving their clients, how, despite all the changes in the industry and the ways in which advisors spend their time, the one thing that hasn’t changed in 30 years is that financial planning is about relationships and helping people, and why, being a good financial planner is less about the compensation or business model that we choose, and more about being skilled enough at communication to be able to explain to someone why they’d be better off going through the financial planning process.

So whether you are interested in learning how Dan communicates the value of financial planning to his clients, how he assesses a client's confidence level in the various aspects of their financial lives, or why he continues to view financial planning as a terrific career path, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Dan Moisand.

The Best Conferences To Attend (Or Not) In 2021 And The Future Of Financial Advisor Conferences

October 26, 2020 07:04 am 3 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

Reinvesting in one’s education is a staple of being a professional and is embodied in both the philosophy and the actual requirement of continuing education (CE). Of course, ideally, financial advisors will want to advance their knowledge not merely to fulfill a CE obligation but for the sake of the additional knowledge and expertise itself, which can pay dividends from better strategies for clients to practice management guidance that (even if not actually CE-eligible) helps them better execute their businesses and service their clients.

However, the world of financial advisor conferences – which so many advisors attend for those continuing education and advanced learning opportunities – were substantively disrupted in 2020 by the coronavirus pandemic, which shuttered virtually all in-person advisor events after the March outbreak through the end of the year, forcing some events to be canceled, others to be delayed into 2021, and most to be pivoted to an online/virtual format with… varying degrees of success.

Starting back in 2012, we began to publish an annual list of recommended conferences for financial advisors to attend – a byproduct of the fact that I’ve been speaking at 50 – 70 conferences per year for more than a decade myself, and as a result, have seen and attended virtually every major advisor event, and could provide a first-hand perspective on which events really delivered on their promise of advisor education, from membership associations to broker-dealers, insurance companies to RIA custodians, trade publications, private events, and more.

But as we come up on 2021, the reality is that no one knows exactly what the options for advisor conferences will even be in the coming year, given both the uncertainty about the timing of the coronavirus vaccine, a major shift in the economics of advisor conferences as vendors have pivoted heavily to running their own webinar events and appear to be scaling back on the future of conferences, and limited experience for any events about how well they really deliver, or not, in a virtual environment.

As a result, this year’s newest list of the “Top Financial Advisor Conferences” for 2021 takes an alternative approach, focusing instead on the ‘knowns’ we can control in the decision of what events to pursue, including Community Events for the advisor’s platform (e.g., the advisor’s broker-dealer, RIA custodian, or advisor network), Deep Learning events for advisors looking to better specialize, immersive Practice Management events for those looking to get more efficient in (or better execute on) their businesses, and the ever-widening range of both free and paid Continuing Education on various topics.

In addition, we’ll continue to maintain our new “Master Conference List” of all financial advisor conferences in 2021, with ongoing updates for which will be virtual versus in-person, as a guide for advisors to plan their own conference budgets and schedule in the coming year.

So I hope you’ll find this upcoming year’s 2021 financial advisor conferences list (and our new 2021 Master Conference List) to be helpful, in an environment that admittedly poses far more uncertainty in the landscape of advisor events than we’ve ever seen… while still recognizing that in the end, reinvesting into our own education as financial advisors is still a professional imperative.

Financial Planning Research Highlights From The 2020 CFP Board Academic Research Colloquium

April 15, 2020 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

From February 20th through February 22nd, the CFP Board’s Center for Financial Planning hosted its third annual Academic Research Colloquium (ARC) for Financial Planning and Related Disciplines in Arlington, VA, to share and discuss research relevant to the financial planning profession.

This year’s event saw a sharp decline in attendance, down about 35% from 2019 (150 attendees in 2020, of which about 20 were practitioners), likely attributable to the fact that this year’s ARC was held separately from the CFP Board’s Registered Programs Conference (RPC), which is required to be attended by program directors of CFP-registered financial planning education programs. While this decline was unfortunate and definitely impacted the overall atmosphere (fewer practitioners, students, and academics who emphasize teaching were in attendance), the quality of the research remained high, and there were a number of papers presented that had strong implications for financial planners.

In this guest post, Dr. Derek Tharp – lead researcher at Kitces.com and an assistant professor of finance at the University of Southern Maine – provides a recap of the 2020 CFP Academic Research Colloquium, and highlights a few particular research studies with relevant takeaways for financial planning practitioners.

The 2020 CFP Academic Research Colloquium again had a strong showing from CFP Board Registered Ph.D. programs, with scholars from Missouri, Texas Tech, Georgia, and Kansas State producing nearly 37% of all research (when weighted by type of presentation and authorship rank). Additionally, Ohio State, Alabama, and Morningstar contributed another combined 15% of total research. Despite the concentration among top institutions, the ARC event remains academically diverse, drawing in scholars to present research from a total of 44 different institutions, including Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, and NYU.

This year’s colloquium featured a wide breadth of topics. Some particularly relevant topics for practitioners included:

Re-examination of the conventional wisdom that small defined-contribution-plan investment menus are better than large menus (instead, research has suggested that bigger menus actually can be better for participants);
An analysis of U.S. consumers’ willingness to pay for hourly financial planning services (which found that most consumers aren’t willing to pay anywhere near the rates that advisors charge);
An investigation of whether fintech-mobile-application nudges can help individuals reduce their spending (yes, they can, but not by very much, and those nudges may drive consumers away from the apps in the future);
A study examining whether the use of a financial advisor among high-investable-asset households is associated with a reduction in financial anxiety or an increase in investment confidence (no to reducing anxiety; yes to increasing confidence); and
A study exploring whether different types of advisors (broker-dealers vs. RIAs, CFP professionals vs. non-CFP professionals, etc.) perceive the new “Best Interest” standard differently than a fiduciary standard (yes, they do; advisors at RIAs are more likely to be mistaken or confused about whether Reg BI applies to them, although brokers are more likely to mistakenly equivocate the “Best Interest” and fiduciary standard).

Overall, the fourth Academic Research Colloquium delivered on bringing together scholars to share high-quality financial planning research. However, this year’s low attendance felt like a step backward for the Center for Financial Planning’s goal to make the ARC the 'academic home' of financial planning. Nonetheless, the ARC continues to be a conference worthy of attending for both academics and practitioners who wish to engage in academic research.