The battle for top financial advisors is intensifying.
With rising economic uncertainty and an increasingly competitive wealth management landscape, how can your firm stay ahead of the pack?
To remain competitive, firms need a great advisor recruiting strategy. And these days, a great advisor recruiting strategy is a digital advisor recruiting strategy.
That means from the time you identify a recruit to when you bring them on board, re-paper their accounts, and have them go to work for their clients, you need to be digitally equipped.
Let’s look at a few ways digitization is changing advisor recruiting.
Digital advisor recruiting processes
Digital recruiting processes were already growing in popularity as digital natives started entering the advisory workforce. The COVID-19 pandemic only boosted the popularity of new digital outreach strategies.
Take Raymond James, for example. When travel restrictions cut the flow of recruits to their St. Petersburg home office, the firm made its pitch to advisors via Zoom. Using digital tools, they’ve managed to keep their advisor pipeline flowing from a distance.
As wealth management firms gradually return to the office, some practices picked up during shutdown are likely to persist or take new forms.
For example, many firms will likely minimize their reliance on conferences for recruiting, instead employing a multi-channel strategy that combines digital outreach with traditional recruiting practices. A recruiter could use inbound marketing and digital advertising to generate interest before a recruitment event, then follow up after in-person meetings using automated email campaigns.
Digital advisor transition services
Transitioning from one broker-dealer to another involves a degree of hassle and risk that makes many advisors hesitant to take the leap.
In fact, an inefficient repapering process can drive away a significant portion of an advisor’s book of business.
To make the pain of transitioning worthwhile, you need to get an advisor’s book of business repapered as soon as possible and with minimal extra effort. For that reason, many wealth management firms are turning to Docupace’s digital advisor transitions services to streamline repapering and improve recruiting.
As a leading option in this field, this service automates the preparation and delivery of documents, including “Change of Broker-Dealer” forms, for all of an advisor’s current clients. Clients can review and sign documents digitally, while allowing the advisor to monitor progress in real-time.
The result? When Docupace helped Vanderbilt Financial Group overhaul their advisor transitions process, their average transition time decreased by 30%, and some transitions were completed in as little as 30 days.
RELATED: Digital advisor transitions can help broker-dealers overcome the talent squeeze. Download the whitepaper to learn how.
Digital wealth management operations
A wealth transfer of monumental proportions is on the horizon as baby boomers prepare to leave money to their children. And yet much of the industry hasn’t implemented the right tools to accommodate this new generation of investors’ digital preferences.
Advisors know that the flexibility and convenience of digital is something their clients value most, yet only 27% of those surveyed by Thomson Reuters said that they’re happy with their existing mobile platform. No surprise that 69% of wealth managers also said they’re concerned about staying relevant with a younger generation of investors.
For broker-dealers, offering client-facing digital tools can be a valuable recruitment tactic.
Beyond that, many advisors are more likely to transfer to broker-dealers where digital operations make day-to-day work simpler and faster. By implementing paperless account opening, document management, esignature, and other digital operations solutions, broker-dealers can increase their chances of landing top advisors.
