Cafemutual completes 9 years of serving you news and knowledge on mutual funds, insurance and other financial products and providing you key insights to help you grow business. Continuing the tradition, we are sharing nine qualities of top advisors on the eve of our ninth anniversary.
Trustworthy
Ensure that your clients believe all your investment advice is in their best interest. You need to exhibit your trustworthiness consistently to assure clients that they are in safe hands.
One way to build trust is to show eagerness to know more about clients’ life, hobbies and thoughts. This makes your clients feel that you are more interested in them than their assets.
“Advisor’s priority should be to build trust with clients. Once clients have faith in your ability, you are secured. Only after the client trusts you, he will give you business,” said Agra IFA Shifali Satsangee of Funds Vedaa.
Approachable
Be accessible for your clients 24*7. “A good advisor is the one who is easy to approach and flexible with clients. He should be able to give timely update about happenings in the economy and markets that matter to their investments,” said Mumbai IFA Sadashiv Arvind Phene.
Ethics
An ideal advisor would be the one who runs an advisory business with ethical practices. He would keep his client’s interest at the forefront and have fiduciary standards. “For me, ethics is basic hygiene that every advisor needs to have to sustain for a long time in the financial distribution industry,” said Vinod Jain of Jain Investments.
Basic business ethics include maintaining privacy of clients’ information and resolving clients’ queries immediately.
Organised
Organise your world to increase productivity. Mumbai IFA Ritesh Sheth of Tejas Consultancy said, “You need to ensure that at least half your workday is spend in client interactions or interacting with industry officials. Do not let operational responsibilities eat away most of your time. It is wiser to hire an operations team and delegate these responsibilities to them. This will free up your time, which you can use to engage with existing clients or meet prospective clients.”
Understanding
Another pre-requisite to be a good advisor is to have deep understanding of the entire bouquet of financial products. This will enable you to provide your clients with a holistic financial solution, which caters to their investment, tax, insurance and expenditure needs.
In fact, all these financial transactions are interlinked. By offering customised tax solutions, you may help your clients save more and thereby invest more. In the same vein, opting for an inappropriate mediclaim policy may require your client to withdraw from his investments in case of a health emergency.
Patience
Adverse market conditions, declining margins, growing compliance burden are some of the challenging situations an IFA would face frequently in his career. To overcome these challenges, he ought to be patient and then resolve all issues.
Analytical skill
Be it structuring an investment plan or analysing the best risk adjusted investment options, you need to have a sound analytical background to effectively understand and analyse the data. There are 1800 schemes in the mutual funds and hence, separating wheat from the chaff is a challenging task if you don’t understand importance of key financial metrics like standard deviation, alpha, beta and real rate of returns.
Planning
Having a clear vision for your business is important. Many believe that having a clear goal in mind can help you achieve new milestones.
So, set down a 3 year and 5 year plan for your business and a path to achieve it. Things may not always go according to your plan but knowing where you want to reach will motivate you to try harder and modify your strategy basis the circumstances.
Groom a successor
Having a succession plan will ensure that your clients, family and team are not left in a lurch in case of an unfortunate mishap. Remember you have built the business with a lot of love and efforts. You would not want it to be in shambles after your demise.
One way to plan a succession is to find and groom an internal succession. Start identifying candidates who might be able to lead the business one day. Figure out the criteria for evaluating candidates and decide what skill sets you will need to help them develop.
