In a previous article we asked:
- Do consumers want long term relationships with their planner?
- Are consumers afraid to visit a financial planner?
"Whilst exams, qualifications and remuneration seem to be at the heart of the professionalism debate, I’d venture to suggest that they are not the key issues for the profession to focus on. Qualifications are merely your ticket to the game, and if the RDR paper is anything to go by, the remuneration issue is finally put to bed. Which means that we can now focus on what professionalism is really all about – how we engage with clients. New Model Shirt is at one end of the scale; George Kinder is at the other.
"In my thirty one years working with IFAs and financial planners (and now Life Planners), with the exception of procedural process dictated by regulation, I have to admit to having seen little change in the way we engage with clients. ‘Knowing your client’ sounds like common-sense to most reasonable people, but I wonder just how seriously this is embraced beyond filling in boxes on a fact find.
"Well, if you know anything about George Kinder’s methodology, you’ll have grasped that that knowing your client takes on a completely different and fundamentally deeper meaning. In fact, it was suggested to me last week that when a client doesn’t proceed with recommendations you have made to them, it is only because YOU the financial adviser have failed to truly understand the client’s motivations and goals. You asked all the questions on the fact find, you ticked all the boxes, you did your research, you made your recommendations, the client made the right noises – but they still didn’t follow your advice.
"What happened? Client inertia? Price? A friend in the pub suggested a different solution? Or was it because you never really got deep under the skin of the client to uncover what really drives them as a human being?
"Anyone who deals with money is under immense scrutiny right now – whether ‘greedy bankers’, MPs, financial advisers or whoever. All are quite rightly searching for ways to enhance the perception of their trustworthiness and credibility, and at the end of the day that will be determined by how each interacts with their customers.
"Now if you want to call George Kinder’s methodology ‘life coaching’ that’s fine with me, but if a graduate of the Kinder Institute helps me to uncover my deepest and most profound goals – and can actually help me achieve them, frankly I don’t care what it’s called. But to be clear, life coaches as we know them do not normally (and are not qualified to) help with your financial affairs, and it will be a financial planner’s skill with money which will help to translate life goals into reality. It’s called Life Planning – not Life Coaching."
Does that help you, a potential or actual consumer of financial planning services, feel less scared of financial planning - or more?
