We believe there are three components to helping your clients build an Intelligent Financial Life™.
- It all starts with data and insights that capture a client’s current financial situation, uncover opportunities, and drive results.
- Then, it’s the technology you use every day to run your business and help clients make real connections, including client management, portfolio management, and business operations tools.
- Finally, it’s about realizing that an Intelligent Financial Life is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. The solutions you’re ultimately recommending and utilizing must address each clients’ specific needs and drive greater personalization in their portfolios.
Why is personalization so important?
70% of wealth management clients see highly personalized service as a factor in deciding whether to stay with their current advisor or switch to another firm.1
What are today’s clients looking for in “highly personalized service”?
In general, you should assume each client has individual needs regarding their:
- Family values
- Family needs and goals
- Expectations and risk profile
- Tax situation
- Preferences, constraints, and counterbalancing
Your book of business is unique to your firm, so the solutions you offer to your clients should also be unique to their needs.
Examples of hyper-personalized client service
Tax support
Investors file their taxes once a year, but taxes should be managed throughout the year. Tax-optimization engines, like Envestnet | PMC’s tax overlay service, measure and consider the tax costs of potential security sales in making all portfolio construction decisions. A portion of the taxes in client portfolios are in the form of realized short-term capital gains. A robust tax-management solution can minimize and, in most instances, eliminate net short-term capital gains realization. By modeling the tax impact of all trades specific to the client’s tax rates and considering realized gains and losses, these solutions aim to deliver the pre-tax returns of the underlying managers and portfolios, while improving after-tax returns.
Credit support
To build and protect net worth, managing what clients owe can be as important as managing what they own. Solutions like Envestnet’s Credit Exchange equip financial advisors with credit solutions alongside planning, investing, and protection tools. When assessing possible credit solutions, look for an option that meets your clients’ core credit needs (e.g. home, personal, investment, and small business financing), while also helping to protect assets from liquidation and providing you with deeper insights into your clients’ total financial assets.
Healthcare support
Planning for future medical needs can be overwhelming and difficult. Providing your clients with a solution that can make those decisions easier can be incredibly valuable. Take Medicare for example. Through our exclusive partnership, Envestnet and Healthpilot are equipping financial advisors with a powerful new capability to enable their Medicare-eligible clients to optimize their health insurance coverage every year, adding a new service for a key demographic for their practices. Healthpilot uses proprietary decision-support algorithms to determine suitable Medicare plans for every user. Clients may directly enroll in their chosen plan and receive real-time access to valuable information, all while estimated out-of-pocket expenses and estimated savings are automatically relayed back to the advisor for incorporation into their financial plan. It is an example of hyper-personalized client service that can provide real value to all involved.
We want you to know that Envestnet is committed to continuing to build out our ecosystem as your needs evolve and grow. We believe that with consumer education, smart technology, and a reframing of how advisors and their clients work together, the advisor of the future will be able to make a connected, Intelligent Financial Life™ a reality for an ever-growing proportion of the population.
Sources:
1. Envestnet, The Advisor’s Playbook for Leading Your Clients Forward, 2020.
The information, analysis and opinions expressed herein are for informational purposes only and do not necessarily reflect the views of Envestnet. These views reflect the judgment of the author as of the date of writing and are subject to change at any time without notice. Nothing contained in this piece is intended to constitute legal, tax, accounting, securities, or investment advice, nor an opinion regarding the appropriateness of any investment, nor a solicitation of any type.
Neither Envestnet, Envestnet | PMC™ nor its representatives render tax, accounting or legal advice. Any tax statements contained herein are not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used, for the purpose of avoiding U.S. federal, state, or local tax penalties. Taxpayers should always seek advice based on their own particular circumstances from an independent tax advisor.
Client must carefully determine if the use of tax overlay services is appropriate for their circumstances, risk tolerance, and investment objectives. Tax management services are limited in scope and are not designed to permanently eliminate taxes in the account.
In providing tax overlay services, Envestnet will allow Client’s account to deviate from Client’s selected investment strategy. Client’s account may experience significant performance differences from the selected investment strategy due to Client’s selection of tax overlay services. Envestnet makes no guarantee that the account’s performance will be within any range of the selected investment strategy or the strategy’s benchmark. If Client subsequently disables tax overlay services this may result in the recognition of significant capital gains.