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Financial Planning Research Highlights From The 2017 CFP Board Academic Research Colloquium

April 5, 2017 07:01 am 10 Comments CATEGORY: Planning Profession

From February 7^th through February 9^th, the CFP Board’s new Center for Financial Planning hosted their inaugural Academic Research Colloquium (ARC) in Washington D.C. The event brought together 215 academics from 130 colleges and universities to share and discuss research relevant to the financial planning profession, as a part of the CFP Board Center's longer-term goal of establishing itself as the “academic home” for the financial planning profession (and the research that supports it).

In this guest post, Derek Tharp – our new Research Associate at Kitces.com, and a Ph.D. candidate in the financial planning program at Kansas State University – provides a recap of the 2017 CFP Academic Research Colloquium, and highlights a few of the latest research studies with particularly relevant takeaways for financial planning practitioners.

The 2017 CFP Academic Research Colloquium had a strong showing from some core financial planning academic programs, with scholars from Texas Tech, Kansas State, Georgia, and The American College serving as lead authors for nearly 50% of all research presentations and poster sessions. Additionally, the colloquium was successful in drawing in scholars from outside of the core financial planning programs, featuring lead authors from 27 other academic institutions, including Wharton School of Business, Harvard Medical School, and Yale.

The colloquium featured a wide range of topics. Some particularly relevant themes for financial planning practitioners ranged from diversity issues within financial planning (including an analysis of the experiences that increase female likelihood of pursuing a career in financial planning, as well as an examination of the predisposition of women to use the services of a financial planner), to client trust and communication (including the use of solution-focused financial therapy techniques to help clients set financial goals, and an investigation of how different types and frequencies of communication are associated with client satisfaction, trust, and commitment), and the always important topic of retirement planning (including a detailed examination of the use of QLACs in retirement income planning).

Overall, the inaugural CFP Academic Research Colloquium was an objective success. Attendance was strong from a wide range of educational institutions (including many not traditionally known for financial planning), research submissions were higher than expected, and the Center for Financial Planning was successful in recruiting a diverse group of academics and practitioners, above and beyond even what the FPA has been able to achieve in recent years with its partnership with the Academy of Financial Services. In the coming years, we will see whether the Center for Financial Planning is successful in their pursuit to become the academic home of financial planning research, but so far it's off to a very strong start.

#FASuccess Ep 014: Validating Your Advisor Value Proposition And Overcoming Imposter Syndrome With Carl Richards

April 4, 2017 07:01 am 11 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back for the fourteenth episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

This week’s guest is Carl Richards, a financial advisor who has successfully grown and sold his own advisory firm, but to most financial advisors is best known as the creator the famous “Behavior Gap” sketch (of the difference between investment and investor returns), and an industry writer and speaker on how to better communicate with clients about complex financial issues.

Carl has a career that many people would be envious of. He’s worked for top-notch financial planning firms, built his own RIA, written two books, publishes a column for The New York Times, and travels internationally to speak to financial advisors around the world about financial planning. Yet ultimately, like so many of us, Carl still faces his own self-doubts about whether the value he provides is really worth what he charges (despite all evidence to the contrary!), a phenomenon known as the “imposter syndrome” that can threaten anyone’s success.

In this episode, Carl shares his story, from accidentally falling into the securities industry, to building an advisory firm, starting his Behavior Gap platform and getting a regular column in the New York Times, how his speaking career built to the point that he’s now paid $10s of thousands of dollar to give a speech, and what he’s learned about the imposter syndrome, and why many great financial advisors constantly question whether or not they’re providing enough value for their clients given what they pay (despite the fact that our client retention rates suggests the overwhelming majority of clients are happy with what we deliver to them!).

And be certain to listen to the end, where Carl talks about how he sees the future of financial planning changing, to a world where technical competency is just the minimum tables stakes to be a financial advisor, why communication skills will be the real key to success going forward, and his number one tip on what any advisor can/should do to get better at this themselves.

So whether you’re struggling to achieve success because you doubt your own value to clients, or if you’re already successful but still nervous that you may not be providing enough value to keep your clients in the long run… or you’ve simply been curious to hear the story of Carl Richards himself, I hope you enjoy this latest episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

The Latest In Financial Advisor #FinTech (April 2017)

April 3, 2017 07:01 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Technology & Advisor FinTech

Welcome to the April issue of the latest news in Financial Advisor #FinTech – where we look at the big news, announcements, and underlying trends and developments that are emerging in the world of technology solutions for financial advisors and wealth management!

This month's edition kicks off with the announcement that Schwab has fully rolled out its "Un-Robo" Schwab Intelligent Advisory solution, pairing investment technology with human CFP certificants providing personal financial planning advice in time to capture market share opportunities with the looming applicability date of the DoL fiduciary rule... ironically pivoting away from its pure Schwab Intelligent Portfolios robo solution, just as Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, and T. Rowe Price have all announced the launch of their own pure robo-advisors, and raising the question of whether the others will ultimately follow suit by un-robo'ing their robo-advisors into tech-augmented human solutions as well. And, in the meantime, pure "robo" advice itself may also be undergoing a pivot, as a major new pilot program between IBM Watson and H&R Block aims to shift "robo" solutions from investments to tax preparation and tax planning instead.

From there, the latest highlights also include:

A slew of advisor FinTech platforms shutting down, including NerdWallet (ending its Ask An Advisor service), AdviceIQ (acquired by FMeX), WealthMinder (acquired by AdvisorEngine), and PrairieSmarts (acquired by Covisum).
Trizic aims to reboot its robo-advisor-for-advisors platform with a $3.3M VC round, and its first major enterprise deal (with John Hancock)
Blooom raises $9M of capital for its B2C "robo" solution in the 401(k) channel, one of the few bright spots of robo tools that are still growing
Oranj rolls out a major new release of its client portal solution
PocketRisk rolls out its 2.0 version of risk tolerance solution, expanding into a two-dimensional risk tolerance assessment process

You can view analysis of these announcements and more trends in advisor technology in this month's column, including whether advisors have missed the boat on PFM (Personal Financial Management) solutions that are now being adopted and rolled out directly by banks instead, how Quovo is trying to position itself as the glue that holds together the future of account aggregation with a new Authentication API, and the latest in estate planning software solutions such as Wishlife, another tool that aims not to facilitate estate tax planning strategies, but the transition of the estate itself and the stories, wishes, and guidance that the decedent wishes to leave behind to his/her heirs.

I hope you're continuing to find this new column on financial advisor technology to be helpful! Please share your comments at the end and let me know what you think!

*And for #AdvisorTech companies who want to submit their tech announcements for consideration in future issues, please submit to [email protected]!

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Apr 1-2)

March 31, 2017 02:54 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the latest news that the Department of Labor has submitted its official 60-day fiduciary rule delay, and sent it along to OMB for final approval... although fiduciary supporters are already raising the question of whether the delay might face a legal challenge, as it's not clear whether the DoL could have realistically read and thoroughly considered in just two weeks the over-1,100 comment letters that were submitted. Also in the news this week is a new FINRA Rule 2165, that would obligate financial firms (and their advisors) to make "reasonable efforts" to get contact information for a trusted third party (or even to stop disbursements from an account) if there is suspicion that a senior client may be getting financial exploited, while also providing a safe harbor against privacy breach or other legal consequences for endeavoring to do so.

From there, we have a few practice management articles, including a look at "what's next" in the world of financial advisor marketing (as we continue the evolution from cold-calling to seminar marketing to client appreciation events and now digital marketing), an important reminder that as financial advisors we use too much industry jargon (often without realizing it), and an interesting way to think about how the client relationship evolves over time from being "just" a customer, to a true client, to a friend, and finally to an advocate (which is food for thought about what you might do to evolve your own clients along that continuum!).

We also have several more technical articles this week, from a discussion by Wade Pfau of "time segmentation" (i.e., bucketing) strategies in retirement (as differentiated from systematic withdrawals from total return portfolios, or various essential-vs-discretionary income approaches), common estate planning mistakes that financial advisors can help their clients avoid, and a look at the recent Tax Court case of Ozimkoski, which provides several valuable reminders of what not to do when handling an inherited IRA!

Towards the end, we have three interesting articles on the theme of retirement, and whether it's all that it's cracked up to be, from a look at the global research on happiness and wellbeing that finds being employed is consistently associated with greater life satisfaction than being unemployed (with white-collar jobs consistently scoring better than blue-collar jobs as well), a look at the real-world challenges that early retirees face in transitioning to retirement when all of their peers are still working, and the results of a fascinating survey from the Wall Street Journal that asked new/recent retirees what they found to be most surprising in retirement, to which they said... almost everything.

We wrap up with the sad news that this week, financial planning visionary Dick Wagner passed away unexpectedly. Wagner has long been recognized as a thought leader in the profession (since long before the term was popular), and was both a former practitioner, former volunteer leader at the chapter and national level in various FPA-predecessor organizations, co-founder of the Nazrudin Project (from which much of the life planning movement emerged), and a tireless advocate of advancing financial planning into a true profession around a broader garden of knowledge that he dubbed the study of "finology". Fortunately, Wagner was able to publish his book, "Financial Planning 3.0", just a few months before he passed away, and in today's weekend reading, we highlight what many view as the seminal article on how financial planners must evolve to truly become a recognized profession... an article he first published in the Journal of Financial Planning in 1990, that we are all collectively still trying to live up to today. Rest in peace, Dick Wagner.

Enjoy the "light" reading!

Marketing Lessons Learned From NerdWallet Ask An Advisor Shutting Down

March 30, 2017 08:30 am 9 Comments CATEGORY: Marketing

As an advisor, one of our most crucial but difficult challenges is figuring out how to get new clients to grow the business. In recent years, several new digital platforms have emerged with the aim to bring consumers and advisors together - allowing advisors to showcase their knowledge by answering consumer questions, with the hope of acquiring new clients. However, as I've warned advisors before, building your digital marketing presence on third-party websites can end badly, and this week's abrupt shutdown of NerdWallet's Ask An Advisor platform is a case-in-point example of what can go wrong!

In this week’s #OfficeHours with @MichaelKitces, my Tuesday 1PM EST broadcast via Periscope, I discuss marketing lessons learned from the news that NerdWallet's Ask an Advisor Platform is shutting down - particularly the risks associated with building your digital marketing strategy on "borrowed land", and what you should do instead to succeed in the long run.

For financial advisors that were using the platform, NerdWallet's announcement to shut down their Ask an Advisor platform came as an abrupt surprise. The personal finance site had started out providing credit card comparisons back in 2009, but in more recent years had branched into other channels, from bank accounts and mortgages, to offering a platform where consumers could ask financial questions and financial advisors could respond to those questions, in the hopes of gaining some visibility and possibly even a new client. But, with only three days notice, NerdWallet suddenly announced resources were being allocated towards other company priorities, and advisors will lose the ability to respond to questions, or even directly edit their profiles, after March 31st.

Notably, this is precisely the type of risk that I've warned advisors about for some time when it comes to building your digital marketing strategy on someone else's platform. Advisors who have poured their heart and soul into the Ask an Advisor platform suddenly have to start their digital marketing strategy all over again from scratch. And the reason they have to is because they built on someone else's platform. If you're an advisor on NerdWallet, you just lost all of your equity value from the content you built, even though NerdWallet can continue to monetize your content by placing ads for their products, their solutions, and their advertisers next to it. That's the risk when you create value but don't retain control of it because it's on someone else's platform!

Now, certainly digital marketing can be an effective strategy for advisors, but the ultimate point of all of this is that if you want to succeed in the world of marketing online, it's not just about creating content to demonstrate your expertise, but retaining control of it so you can build on it over time. Which not only avoids the risk of having the content disappear when some other company decides to "reallocate resources" elsewhere, but also ensures that you have the ability to control how the prospect experiences the content, and the call to action they get at the end! Which is what really drives new client results!

In the end, building on your own websites means that you own the traffic, you own the SEO value, and you can create the call to action that turns readers into bona fide prospects – all without worrying whether you are going to lose control of the platform or your ability to engage a prospect in the future. Don't be a digital sharecropper. Build a foundation you own, you control, and that you can leverage to turn your audience into real new client business!

Evaluating Phi: Is Motivation Really The Hidden Variable Of Organizational Performance?

March 29, 2017 07:02 am 2 Comments CATEGORY: Investments

In November of 2016, a joint 18-month study from the State Street Center for Applied Research and the CFA Institute, which combined 200 in-depth interviews with global industry leaders and a survey of 3,300 "investment professionals", was released, and claimed to have discovered "the hidden variable of [organizational] performance". Dubbed "Phi", the research suggested that a combination of the motivational forces of Purpose, Habits, and Incentives was associated with superior organizational outcomes; specifically, the results showed that a one-point increase in Phi was associated with 28% greater odds of excellent organizational performance, 55% greater odds of excellent client satisfaction, and 57% greater odds of excellent employee engagement.

In this guest post, Derek Tharp – our new Research Associate at Kitces.com, and a Ph.D. candidate in the financial planning program at Kansas State University – analyzes the Phi study and delves deeper into exactly what it is, how it is measured, and what conclusions should (and shouldn't) be drawn from this study.

Because while the researchers did find a statistically significant relationship between Phi (as measured by self-reported purpose, habits, and incentives), and organizational outcomes, client satisfaction, and employee engagement, it's not entirely clear what the results actually prove.

The challenge, in part, is that the study itself didn't actually evaluate organizational performance, client satisfaction, or employee engagement! Instead, the researchers evaluated self-reported assessments of organizational performance, client satisfaction, and employee engagement, and compared them to self-reported statistics on Phi (for the entire organization). And this distinction is meaningful, because it isn't exactly clear that employees make valid or reliable assessments of company-wide motivational forces, nor the entire company's organizational performance, client satisfaction, or employee engagement — and especially when these employees may not actually even know if clients' goals are being met (how "organizational performance" was defined), whether clients or satisfied, or whether other employees within a large multinational financial services firm are actually even engaged!

In addition, there's the fundamental challenge that a correlation between two data points doesn't necessarily prove causation either. In other words, the fact that high-performing organizations also report higher Phi doesn't mean the higher Phi caused the better results. Perhaps organizations that are already outperforming simply attract more motivated employees (which means the causality goes the other direction).

In the end, the Phi study did ask some interesting questions and set out with some lofty ambitions to evaluate the impact of motivational forces - a question that is admittedly not easy to study. But until further research can tie Phi to actual outcomes or provide evidence that the self-reported measures are assessing something meaningful in a valid and reliable way, then the conclusions we can actually draw from the Phi research are limited.