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The Future of the FPA, the CFP Board and the Organizations that Run the Planning Profession
by Bob Veres, 4/16/18

Last month, I asked readers of Advisor Perspectives to help me think through some complicated issues regarding the future of the profession. Should the professional associations (like the FPA and NAPFA) consolidate in order to create more scale and unity, or should we maintain a healthy competition between them? Today we look at the responses I received.

Who Shall Rule the Planning Profession? Competition versus Consolidation
by Bob Veres, 3/21/18

If there’s one topic that is guaranteed to stir up passions in the financial planning/advisory profession it’s consolidation of associations and credentials. Consider some of the issues that are being debated today.

Three Emerging Trends That Are Upending Our Profession
by Bob Veres, 3/19/18

Last year, I made a number of bold predictions about how the advisory profession is evolving, and what firms are going to have to do to stay ahead of the curve. How have my predictions held up? Here are three transformations that will force every advisory firm to adapt.

The Tech Landscape: Results of the 2018 Technology Survey
by Bob Veres, 2/19/18

The 2018 Software Survey, conducted by Advisor Perspectives, Joel Bruckenstein at T3, and my firm, Inside Information, offered by far the most comprehensive data on the advisor tech landscape ever collected. In all, we received 1,554 useable responses, representing firms very small to very large, across a broad spectrum of experience in the business.

Eight Rules for Developing the Next Generation of Leaders
by Bob Veres, 10/10/17

According to Philip Palaveev, the most successful firms have the most talented and competent advisors and support staff. This doesn’t happen by accident. These firms are better at developing the skills of younger advisors and staff members. Here’s how they do that.

What’s Behind the Anti-Fiduciary Mindset?
by Bob Veres, 9/27/17

In case you missed it, on September 7, APViewpoint hosted one of the best debates ever regarding the fiduciary standard and the DOL rule. It was notable because unlike most of what you’ve been reading, it covered both sides of the topic, and the debaters forced each other to provide deeper rationales for their beliefs. Here are my key insights, particularly those that illustrate the thinking behind the anti-fiduciary mindset.

The Five Points that Belong on Every Advisor’s Website
by Bob Veres, 8/28/17

Shouldn’t clients be able to look on a financial planner’s website and see what services they can expect to receive for the fees they expect to pay? Shouldn’t the profession evolve a pricing model where people who do more for the client can charge more, and those who do less will charge less?

Seven Surprising Insights about Advisory Fees
by Bob Veres, 7/17/17

I asked the readers of my Inside Information service, members of the Advisor Perspectives community, and others, to tell me how they were charging their clients, and how much. The most interesting conclusions related to a key question that has arisen from the DOL Rule: what is a “reasonable” AUM fee to charge clients?

The Best Fund Managers – As Voted by their Peers
by Bob Veres, 5/22/17

Today’s indexing mania is driving the marketing people at the best active fund complexes completely crazy, but the top portfolio managers – that is, the people who really, truly enjoy investing – are seeing a lot of new opportunities.

My Journey toward a Better, Simpler Fiduciary Rule
by Bob Veres, 4/24/17

I have no problem whatsoever with the intent of the DOL fiduciary rule (may it rest in peace). But I was dismayed with the rule’s final form. In fact, I believe that the DOL’s voluminous tome can be distilled to a single sentence.

What’s the Difference between a TAMP and a Robo?
by Bob Veres, 3/20/17

Are “robos” nothing more than the latest version of TAMPs – turn-key asset management platforms?

The Full Results from our Software Survey
by Bob Veres, 3/20/17

The 2017 Software Survey, co-sponsored by Advisor Perspectives, Inside Information and the T3 conference, is available. On behalf of the sponsors, I want to thank the 1,064 professionals who participated. What did we learn?

DOL Fiduciary Compliance Part II: The most comprehensive solutions for RIA firms
by Bob Veres, 1/23/17

Let’s look at a couple of new tools that give you an integrated solution to DOL fiduciary compliance. Are you recommending a superior asset allocation? Are you recommending better investments in the IRA than the client previously owned? Is the IRA’s all-in cost lower than the plan sponsor’s offering, and if not, are you offering more services than the plan sponsor was offering?

New Tools to Prove You Acted as a Fiduciary
by Bob Veres, 1/16/17

This article, the first of two parts, is a review of some of the more prominent new tools that advisors can lean on as they prepare for the full DOL rule implementation on April 10. Each of them addresses a different aspect of the rule, and they all approach it from different angles.

Why Advisors Benefit if the DOL Rule is Repealed
by Bob Veres, 1/2/17

After multiple debates with my Inside Information audience, I’m picking up surprising opinions about the DOL fiduciary rule and its imminent demise.

A New Tool to Visualize Retirement Planning
by Bob Veres, 11/7/16

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could take a prospective client’s asset allocation and calculate the percent of time periods since 1926 that it would have survived a 30-year retirement?

Where the Value Lies
by Bob Veres, 10/31/16

Bob Veres recently summarized how he views his role as a journalist for financial advisors. We thought we would share it with you, because it also encapsulates our approach to advancing the advisory profession.

The Hidden Risk in your Custodial Agreements
by Bob Veres, 9/19/16
Here’s a shocker: Chances are, your RIA firm has custody of client accounts – and you’ll receive unpleasant news after your next SEC audit.

A Seven-Step Plan to Transform Your Practice
by Bob Veres, 8/23/16

Advisory firms face a daunting challenge as they prepare themselves for the latest version of the future. They will have to retool their service offering for a new generation of clients (aka Millennials), who have very different preferences, different advice needs and far more digital sophistication than your Baby Boomer clients ever had.

Can New Portfolio-Risk Tools Improve Client Results – Or Win New Business?
by Bob Veres, 7/26/16
New portfolio-risk tools have been created specifically to integrate with FinaMetrica and map a client’s risk tolerance with an actual (and revised) portfolio. I looked at two such tools to see if they can help advisors improve client results – or if they can help win new business. Here’s what I found out.

How to Psychologically Prepare Clients for Bear Markets
by Bob Veres, 6/14/16
Preparing yourself and your clients for bearish times may be the most important investment activity you engage in, more important than your portfolio design work or your research into the actual investments that you recommend.

Three Nontraditional Ways to Boost Your Top-Line Revenues
by Bob Veres, 5/10/16
In addition to the traditional things like working your client referral network, courting centers of influence and hitting the social media with tweets and blogs, a few nontraditional avenues of growth have opened up. If you aren’t exploring them, you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

How to Identify and Overcome the Limits to Your Success
by Bob Veres, 4/5/16
Confronted by a client who balks at a high fee or by a team member whose performance is imperfect, many advisors react by assuming that the problem is their own. One’s fees are lowered and the employee’s job description is remade. But this mindset exposes a lack of self-awareness, according to Stephanie Bogan. Instead, she says that by recognizing your inherent predispositions you can be on a “limitless” path to success.

Inside Information - March 2016
by Bob Veres, 4/4/16
This is a complimentary issue of Bob Veres' Inside Information. The lead article defines the robo-advisor challenge as nothing more than the next evolution of professional software—I call it Software 2.0—with intelligent built-in capabilities. The article looks at how the venture capitalists who funded the robo-platforms identified three significant weaknesses in the advisor profession they hoped to disrupt. As it turns out, instead of disrupting us, they did us all a big favor. By exposing certain weaknesses, the venture capitalists showed us several ways to increase your top-line revenues without any additional labor from you or your staff.

Our Survey Results: How Good are Advisors at Their Own Financial Planning?
by Bob Veres, 3/1/16
Do advisors have a financial plan for themselves – like the ones they prepare for their clients? Are they financially prepared to retire? Do they take the same degree of risk in their investments as they do for clients? My extensive survey revealed some surprising – and even disturbing – results. As a bonus, we now have hard data showing who advisors want as the next president.

Should Advisors Hire a Financial Planner?
by Bob Veres, 1/12/16
Based on conversations with advisors who have allowed themselves to be financial planning clients, I’ve come to believe that most – perhaps all – financial planners should hire an outside professional.

The Case against Wall Street
by Bob Veres, 12/22/15
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we are here today to consider the case of a defendant who is familiar to everyone: the brokerage industry, or simply Wall Street. The defendant is charged with a number of crimes: employing deceptive business practices; operating a cartel; undermining consumer protections; engaging in anti-competitive behavior against the emergent financial advisory profession; exerting undue and improper influence on Congress and the regulators; raking in excess profits and thereby harming the American economy that it originally was created to benefit.

The Investment Portfolio of the Future
by Bob Veres, 11/24/15
I envision a world where advisors are vetting a growing number of nontraditional investments for their clients.

The Paris Attacks
by Bob Veres, 11/17/15
Here is a letter you can send to clients in response to the Paris attacks.

Where to Look for Outperforming Active Managers
by Bob Veres, 10/19/15
Not all stock-pickers are winners, and winning funds tend to be scattered all over the various sectors of the market. Is there a way to analyze the different segments of the global opportunity set, and determine the best places to look for those outperforming managers?

How to Generate Alpha without Selecting Superior Funds
by Bob Veres, 9/21/15
In Part I of my series on active investment management, I described two types of research that attempted to help advisors uncover above-average talent: identifying conditions where you are more likely to find outperformers, and better ways to identify above-average managers. As it turns out, there’s a third possibility. Instead of identifying superior funds, you identify superior combinations of funds – which, of course, includes a fund-selection process, but then takes it one step further.

The Active-Passive Debate Revisited
by Bob Veres, 8/31/15
Asset flows to passively managed funds are surging. But, as often happens, advisors are embracing a trend just as debunking information is arriving in the marketplace. New research is showing that selecting above-average active funds may not be the impossible task that the academic research has suggested.

The Most Important Success Factors
by Bob Veres, 8/18/15
What are the most important success factors that you should have in order to achieve your business and personal goals (whatever they may be) and in what order?

Fees vs. Commissions: Why An Old Debate Is New Again
by Bob Veres, 7/14/15
Robo-advisors are forcing us to revisit the ancient fees versus commissions debate. New data and new circumstances have changed the debate in powerful ways.

How Advisors Are Positioning Fixed-Income Portfolios
by Bob Veres, 3/17/15
I asked the readers of my Inside Information newsletter service to tell me how they're preparing for an impending Fed rate hike. To date, I've received 178 pages of responses from advisors all over the country and across the spectrum, from indexers to fervent believers in active management, representing large and small firms investing on behalf of wealthy or middle-income clients.

Three Reasons why Robo-Advisors are a Huge Benefit to the Advisory Profession
by Bob Veres, 12/23/14
It's time to change our thinking about the so-called robo-advisory firms that are moving into the financial planning landscape. They are going to be far more beneficial to the planning/investment advisory profession than any innovation in recent decades. Let's explore three ways these firms are changing the planning ecology, and note that all of them are not just positive, but significantly positive.

The Tool that Will Transform Firmwide Financial Planning
by Bob Veres, 10/21/14
Alex Murguia, founder and CEO of InStream Solutions, may be the most creative visionary in today's advisor software ecosystem. And like all people who think outside the box, sometimes he discovers that his best ideas have far better uses than he intended.

The Five Biggest Ways Your Practice Needs to Change
by Bob Veres, 10/7/14
Telling you to brace for change, over and over again, isn't exactly helping you make concrete plans. With the constant demands on your time, it would be helpful to know: What are the new realities to which you must adapt? Where are the transitions going to impact your practice? What old ways are you going to have to abandon, and what new ones will you have to adopt? Here's my list, including five that are either urgent or high-priority changes.

What is "Fee-Only?" Is the CFP Board Taking the Right Approach to Defining it?
by Bob Veres, 9/9/14
Which is more important to your advisory practice - your CFP designation or your fee-only status? Before you answer, consider this: Your CFP mark says very little about whether you adhere to a fiduciary standard, and less about your mode of compensation. Those issues are at the forefront of an ongoing controversy pitting the CFP Board against a prominent advisor, and there is little sign that its outcome will resolve the ongoing debate about how to define a fee-only professional engagement. If anything, it raises more questions than answers.

Ranking the Top 10 "Differentiators" for Advisory Firms
by Bob Veres, 9/2/14
If we have a clear idea of what foregrounds one advisory firm ahead of others, then we can deliberately cultivate those characteristics. The problem is, nobody has ever compiled a comprehensive list of differentiators, much less ranked them according to importance. So, to fill that obvious void, I've ranked the top 10 differentiators that I've personally seen advisors use in their positioning and marketing.

Ten Reasons the Advisory Business is Unlike Any Other
by Bob Veres, 8/5/14
The business dynamics that an advisory firm faces are so fundamentally different that any small business owner, dropped into your executive chair, would feel like she had been transported to another planet. To see how exceptional your business climate really is, let's take a quick tour of some of the differences between an investment advisory firm and a typical member of the business landscape.

What an Elite Group of Younger Advisors Has to Say
by Bob Veres, 7/1/14
I recently served as a facilitator for the annual NexGen conference, this year held on the campus of Augustana University in Moline, IL. I was able to gain insight into the very different way that the financial planning landscape looks through the eyes of younger advisors just starting their careers - and in many cases, from the bottom end of a planning firm's organizational chart.

Six Questions for the Future of the Planning Profession
by Bob Veres, 6/10/14
A few weeks ago, I asked for your help as we created the scenario learning session for the Insider's Forum conference in September. We're going to map out some possible futures that you can prepare for, using as raw material the crowdsourced thoughts and ideas that you provide to us. Here are six questions that have been raised and addressed about the future in the first round of our exercise.

Ten Ways the Next Generation of Financial Planners Will Change the Profession
by Bob Veres, 5/6/14
I have distilled ten key themes that illustrate how the next generation of advisors will change the profession when they take the reins.

How to Help Business Clients Unlock Wealth
by Bob Veres, 4/29/14
Is there a way to help your business clients diversify their holdings, take some risk off the table and create a side investment portfolio that will sustain them if their business runs into trouble? Is there a way you can help your clients find capital when they need it most?

How to Avoid Hidden Costs in Your Bond Allocations
by Bob Veres, 4/1/14
The supposedly safe move to shorten bond maturities in anticipation of rate increases has been very costly over the last three years - and there’s no reason to expect the next three will be any different. Here’s a way to quantify those costs and position your portfolios in a way that makes money in a variety of interest-rate scenarios.

Crashing Through the Insurance Industrys Wall of Silence
by Bob Veres, 3/11/14
A cash-value insurance policy is essentially a mutual fund investment account that pays annual term-insurance premiums on behalf of the policyholder each year, so theoretically you should be able to get the same disclosure on the funds and on yearly payment for life insurance protection, the way you do on any of the term insurance websites. Heres how you can do that for your clients.

Five Technology Trends that are Reshaping the Industry
by Bob Veres, 2/25/14
Recently, I spent a couple of days at the annual T3 conference - the financial planning professions version of the Consumer Electronics Show. The conference brings together tech vendors offering planning software, CRM, portfolio tracking, rebalancing and trading, outsourcing, hosting and screening. Here are five trends that will help all of us put the new technology into perspective.

Do-It-Yourself Practice Valuations
by Bob Veres, 2/4/14
More firms are looking to grow through acquisition. Indeed, this pathway to growth has been incredibly vibrant in the last 12 months. But the biggest impediment has been unrealistic expectations and valuations. Here is a tool that addresses these valuation challenges - and it comes at exactly the right time for the profession.

Looking Back at the Advisory Profession 20 Years from Now
by Bob Veres, 1/28/14
Ive powered up my time-travel hardware to take a clear look at the year 2034. Ive received budgetary approval to make a long-distance phone call into the future, and conduct a real interview with a successful advisor in that time period. Yes, it was expensive. But nothing is too good for our readers.
Results 51–100 of 141 found.