{"id":5109,"date":"2020-12-03T10:00:50","date_gmt":"2020-12-03T10:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emoneyadvisor.com\/?post_type=thought_leadership&p=5109"},"modified":"2020-12-02T18:18:41","modified_gmt":"2020-12-02T18:18:41","slug":"achieving-advanced-planner-status-through-a-maturity-model","status":"publish","type":"thought_leadership","link":"https:\/\/emoneyadvisor.com\/blog\/achieving-advanced-planner-status-through-a-maturity-model\/","title":{"rendered":"Achieving Advanced Planner Status Through a Maturity Model"},"content":{"rendered":"

What’s driving the growth of holistic wealth planning?<\/p>\n

Those in the financial services industry are well versed in fee compression, regulatory pressures, and the commoditization of investment management. The evolving needs of clients are steadily becoming a major force of change as well, as you can see in Fidelity’s Advice Value Stack<\/a>SM.<\/sup><\/p>\n

It is the convergence of all these different forces that is requiring financial professionals, and the home offices that lead them, to reevaluate their value propositions and discover what a holistic wealth planning practice could do for long-term business growth.<\/p>\n

Meeting Demand or Just Good Business?<\/b><\/h2>\n

<\/b>There’s a large subgroup of financial advisors out there who have been in the business for a while and are pretty successful at selling annuities or mutual funds. But they don’t do planning and they struggle to adapt, primarily because their current approach is working just fine. But what’s working now may not work in the future and being slow to adapt could spell trouble down the road.<\/p>\n

The majority of home office professionals or those in leadership roles, however, understand they need to strategically align their business with the shifting demands of the marketplace. Most financial professionals see planning as a good business opportunity\u2014not only for the impact it can have on clients, but also because of this course change within the industry.<\/p>\n

Holistic Wealth Planning Practices<\/b><\/h2>\n

At Fidelity, we believe that the best path forward is to offer planning, specifically holistic wealth planning. While many financial professionals also see the path as promising, we have worked with enough firms to know that there can be struggles to either transition, grow, or establish a holistic wealth planning practice.<\/p>\n

Through research and interviews with hundreds of advisors, Fidelity has identified a path to advance a firm’s holistic wealth planning practice, supporting early planners along a maturity curve to become Advanced Planners.*<\/p>\n

Advanced planner firms\u2014those furthest along the maturity spectrum\u2014are optimizing their planning practice. For example, advance planner firms spend 1.5x the amount of time on each plan. By spending more time to develop a plan, it moves from being a transaction to an opportunity for deeper and broader knowledge of clients’ lives. On top of this, we found nine in ten advanced planner firms utilize a central planning team.<\/p>\n

Adapting Advanced Planner Practice Management<\/b><\/h2>\n

Our research uncovered four areas of concentration advanced planner firms acted upon: culture, technology, training, and marketing. Understanding these areas and their connection to the maturity model, can help guide professionals on a step-by-step process to implement holistic wealth planning.<\/p>\n

If we draw back to that earlier example of the subgroup that was hesitant to get into planning, this group is somewhere between five years in the business and primarily focused on sales. They may work in banks or branch offices. For a majority of them the goal is to get up to speed on financial planning, but their organization currently lacks the tools or structure to support them.<\/p>\n

Here’s how incorporating some of the practice management techniques could be implemented for this group:<\/p>\n