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Portfolio > Portfolio Construction

5 Trends Shaking Up Advisor Value Propositions Now

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The independent financial advisor industry is undergoing rapid technological innovation and growth in client service expectations that are collectively leading to big new opportunities — as well as big new challenges — for firms of all shapes and sizes.

In the substantial experience of Erich Holland, these and other trends mean financial advisors must rethink their value propositions as well as their traditional approach to serving clients and operating the business.

As the head of sales and experience in SEI’s advisor support business, Holland is in a good position to know such things.

“We hear a lot of interesting things from our clients and prospects every day about how their firms are evolving,” Holland says. “At SEI, we’ve been serving the independent advisor space for 30 years, and our value proposition has always been about helping advisors allocate their time to the highest-value tasks and efforts. This is more important today than ever before.”

According to Holland and others, never before have clients been placing so much demand on their advisors. Drawing their expectations from their broader lives as 21st century consumers, Holland explains, clients are demanding far more holistic, personalized and digitally enabled services from their financial advisors, and this is requiring advisors to make some pretty big changes of their own.

The collective force of these pressures, Holland argues, is driving advisors to revisit their value proposition and the foundations of their go-to-market strategy. He says those advisors who are willing to ask and answer tough questions can hope to stand out in the years ahead, while those who fail to innovate will surely fall behind.

According to Holland, advisors who feel like they are being caught flatfooted by the current moment should consider the following five trends, each of which speaks to a different part of the advisor’s value proposition. Some may be more relevant to a particular advisor than others, he explains, but all should provide some important food for thought in today’s dynamic marketplace.

1. Fiduciary differentiation is dead.

As Holland argues, being a fiduciary is not a differentiator in 2023, demonstrated by the fact that 75% of all outward bank and wirehouse advisor asset flows in 2022 went to fee-based, fiduciary advisor accounts.

“This is really telling,” Holland says. “If you look back even just 10 years ago, calling yourself a fiduciary really meant something. It allowed advisors to hold themselves out as being different, and that worked for a while, but recent and ongoing regulatory changes have done a lot to reshape the industry.”

Holland says banks and wirehouses are making their own changes to account for these outflows and the increasing popularity of the independent model.

“The banks and wirehouses are still able to bring a massive amount of support and infrastructure to their advisors, and that remains an advantage,” Holland notes. “The connection to a bank or wirehouse means advisors can bring in other services and solutions that can be harder to source for independent RIAs outside of special partnerships.”

Another key part of this trend is the recruiting angle, Holland suggests.

“Younger people are flocking towards the independent model,” he says. “It’s just so challenging to go down the old route, where you join a wirehouse or bank and you have to immediately build out your book right away. The new way is to do more teaming in the independent space and to learn how to be a holistic wealth manager.”

2. More access, more problems.

According to Holland, the pandemic helped to spur unprecedented growth in self-directed, digital brokerage platforms, with both positive and negative results.

“These platforms are driving investors to have a heightened awareness of the costs of investment accounts, but these investors are also experiencing more problems with these accounts, presenting an opportunity for advisors to reiterate their value proposition,” Holland argues. “What is perhaps the scariest thing here is the irrational exuberance.”

As Holland observes, everyone with a smartphone can now be a day trader, and they also have more access to tools, analysis and raw market information than ever before. This state of affairs has created a lot of investors who significantly overestimate their market-timing prowess.

“Again, the positive dynamic here is that power is being democratized and shifting to the end consumer, but that comes with problems, too,” Holland warns. “Advisors have always had to deal with that one stubborn engineer client who thinks they know everything there is to know about alpha, beta, convexity and cost. Today, a lot more people have this attitude.”

3. Investors are looking beyond mutual funds.

Holland says the proliferation of better investment technology has led to higher allocations to passive and alternative strategies, and advisors need to be aware of how the typical portfolio is changing.

“For example, generally, exchange-traded funds have exploded in popularity, and they have some really attractive features for advisors and clients to understand,” Holland says.

Among these attractive features are ETFs’ generally lower costs and their ability to help investors avoid some of the taxation issues that can vex mutual fund users. One thing to be warry of, Holland says, is the rapid proliferation of specialized and niche ETFs, which may not be suitable for most investors but which can nonetheless look attractive to the untrained eye.

“If you step back and look at this, just 20 years ago, there were not even 300 ETFs globally,” Holland explains. “Now, there are nearly 9,000 funds with some $10 trillion in total assets collected. The proliferation of ETFs is only set to increase, too.”

Apart from the growing use of ETFs, Holland says, advisors must also be mindful of the way high- and ultra-high-net-worth clients are seeking access to alternative investments and private equity.

4. Tax optimization is the hottest ticket.

As Holland emphasizes, investors are looking for personalized solutions for their specific problems. The need that often reigns supreme across clients is tax efficiency.

Pointing to SEI survey data, Holland says some 48% of advisors rank tax optimization as the highest growth opportunity, while 23% of UHNW investors are seeking tax-planning services.

Despite these figures, only 31% of advised assets are currently subject to tax loss harvesting in the U.S.

“So, the tax-focused separately managed account market is poised for growth,” Holland says. “Given the complexity of serving tax-focused clients at scale, we believe advisors must embrace technology if they want to compete and differentiate in this area.”

5. UMAs are here. ‘HMAs’ are next.

Holland says cutting-edge advisors are already using SMAs, and they are now gravitating toward unified managed accounts, or UMAs.

“SMAs offer a step towards personalization, but UMAs take it even further, effectively allowing you to take a top-down view of all of a client’s holdings across their SMAs and other holdings,” Holland explains. “Having this bird’s eye view helps advisors and their clients to better coordinate their trading and overall tax management.”

According to Holland, advisors are already expressing interest in what he calls “household managed accounts.”

“These are like UMAs, but they go beyond the individual to account for the tax outlook of the entire household, offering yet another layer of potential added value,” Holland says.

Credit: jozefmicic/Adobe Stock


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