Issue link: https://resources.envestnet.com/i/1527487
Taking the Measure of Advice © 2022 Envestnet. All rights reserved. 17 CONCLUSION The Intelligent Financial Life Advisor Practice Score is intended to be a valuable tool for advisors, providing them insight into how effectively they are delivering financial wellness to their clients, identifying for them areas of strength and weakness, and helping them adapt their approach in ways that are likely to lead to improved financial outcomes for not only their clients but also their practice. The research into advisor behaviors and client financial wellness indicated that there are five critical factors for advisors: • Expand advice services to address the client's financial household: Delivery of financial wellness will require advisors to go beyond table stakes like retirement savings, college savings, and estate planning. Advisors will need to address short and long-term goals and support cash flow planning. Advisors should also expand their understanding capabilities into nontraditional advice areas like banking, healthcare, elder care, etc. Advisors should consider leveraging a third-party or key vendors/platform provider to fill gaps in the advice offering and expertise. • Increase value and emphasis on financial planning: The delivery of financial wellness strongly correlates with the creation and implementation of comprehensive financial plans for clients. Advisors will need to better incorporate financial planning into their practice and client engagement process to provide support across their client base. Adopting a multigoal approach will allow advisors to have more frequent engagements with clients to discuss and monitor their planning goals. Increasing use of financial planning tools and application will be paramount. • Understanding behavioral financial and attitudes toward money is a differentiator: Being able to navigate how client attitudes and behaviors toward money, investing, and savings, and how this will impact the financial household and goals will be essential for advisors to stand out and demonstrate value with clients. While this skill set develops through experience, advisors will need to be more deliberate and build out a more formalized approach to engaging clients and obtaining behavioral references and perspectives using an effective discovery process and customer relationship management capability to identify manage their impact and expectations.