Built To Scale with CRC-Oyster
Built To Scale with CRC-Oyster is the newly rebranded Oyster Stew podcast following the acquisition of Oyster Consulting by Compliance Risk Concepts. The podcast features candid, thoughtful conversations that explore not only compliance and risk management, but the broader financial services industry. Each episode examines emerging trends, key issues, and current developments shaping the industry and affecting the firms and professionals who operate within it.
Built To Scale with CRC-Oyster
The Value a Paraplanner Can Add to Your Business
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Paraplanners can make a financial planner's work life easier and more productive. Join Bill Davis and Matt Thomson, Head of Training at MoneyGuide Pro, as they discuss the challenges financial planners and Advisors face in today’s market, and how having Paraplanners can help resolve some of these issues.
CRC-Oyster: Compliance Risk Concepts / Oyster Consulting
Welcome to the oyster stew podcast, where we discuss what's happening in the industry. Based on what we see as we work with regulators and clients, oyster consultants, our industry practitioners, we aren't career consultants. We've done your job and we know the issues you face. You can learn more about oyster consulting and the value we can add to your firm by going to our website, oyster llc.com. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the oysters to podcast. I'm Libby hall marketing analyst at Wister consulting. And today we're going to be talking about paraplanners and the role that they can play to make an advisor's life easier and more productive with me are bill Davis. Who's leading oysters experience planning services team, and Matt Thompson, head of training at money guide pro first, let's talk about the challenges advisors and their firms face in today's market. Matt, could you speak to that a little bit?
Speaker 2Clients and investors in general are they're hearing a lot of noise, right? They go to their , their , their credit card website, their bank website, their 401k, and on all of these sites. Now they're , they're offered these calculators. You might call them planning solutions or, you know, essentially click here to see if you're on track for retirement based on, you know, and they'll kickstart it with whatever basic information they know about, you know, the count that you have with them. And that type of thing. And employers are doing this too . I found a study the other day that showed that , uh , 80% of employers are either have in place or working to implement a financial wellness program for their employees. And so there's all these , uh , folks, you know, whether they're different advisors or different firms that are offering their advice to investors, your potential clients and prospects, and , and it just really speaks to the importance of offering planning to everyone in your book of business and making it clear even to prospective users, that this is an offering that I have, that I'm going to make available to my clients. And so that, that's really a big challenge. You know, there's a lot of responsibilities that advisors have the criticality of, of offering planning has, has never been higher. And , and we really think this partnership with oyster is going to allow the scalability of offering planning to more clients and be able to compete with all that noise that's out there in the industry with, with different offerings, for planning and calculators and that type of thing.
Speaker 1Yeah. Good points, Matt. I think the other thing that a phase one to think about in the current environment is that planning and financial plans for clients can be a valuable
Speaker 3Tool, is they work through the current regulatory environment and around reg BI. But again, it's important to note that this is just one tool and that tool box, the planning software it's by itself does not resolve for reg BI, but it is a good tool and the tool box to get them there and working towards working in the client's best interest,
Speaker 2I'd say that's consistent bill with what we're hearing for firms plans for addressing that, that regulation issue is, is having, you know, saved reports of , uh , from a money guide plan or whatever financial planning tool they're using as part of the documentation required to satisfy those , uh, those requirements. So a little bit about what oysters gone through when we started this relationship , uh, several months ago. And the, the idea is that we have a number of financial advisors that are trying to figure out how to make time for creating plans. Uh , they know the value of it and , and have bought into that. But it's all about the scalability. Oyster also saw this as an opportunity to help advisors. And so , uh , they came to us kind of as obviously the subject matter experts of, of money guide. And we developed the very first ad money guide, the very first pair planner certificate program. It started with putting them through one of our boot camps that we offer for advisors, which is a six hour session. Then we did seven hours with the folks at oyster going through the program where we really do a deep dive into, you know, some of the hiccups that sometimes people run into and putting plans in , uh , maybe the common questions and data entry errors that that will occur and , and putting plans in. And then we finished it up after going through those several case studies had an assessment at the end, which was a , uh, a rather robust , uh , bill might agree with me here rather robust case study at the end, where they had to put a poll , all the pieces from a case study and , and figure out how to get it entered into, into money guide. So it was a great experience for us and , uh, you know, we're maybe ultimately looking how we can apply that elsewhere, but , uh , we're excited about this initial partnership as we find some of our current clients and potential prospects may be able to benefit from , uh, from, from these services that are oysters offering.
Speaker 3Thanks, Matt. We really enjoy our close relationship with, with MoneyGuidePro , uh, the training we received and we look forward to working closely with you all, as we produce money guide pro plans for FAS moving forward, our goal here is to work closely financial advisors , to help them increase their book. As they move forward. We know many, many advisors like to spend their time with their clients, networking, growing their business. And , and while money got pro is not a difficult program to work with. It does take time. And that's one of the things that, that we strive to work with FAS on is to take that time off their hands, to help them with gathering the info, organizing that info, reviewing assumptions with the FFA and putting that information for them into the plan, developing a target plan, and then closely reviewing that with them and creating the reports so that , um, they can go over the plan with the client firsthand . So it's an interaction from the beginning where the phase gathering data all the way through the completion of the plan, and then the FFA can work closely with the advisor or with the client, and really have, have an interactive conversation. They can, you know, we can use the Zoomer tool or they can use plays on when talking with the client, which is an interactive tool. And again, to really make that plan come alive and to work closely with the clients , our goal is to work with the FFA to free up time so that he can spend his time selling and , and gathering more assets and working closely with the clients.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think you're exactly right bill. And there's an acronym that came out years ago called hubu you might've, might've seen it H a B U , and we kind of embraced it here at money guide , but it speaks to your highest and best use. And I think that's a critical piece of considering whether or not you use it, a paraplanner is appropriate for you, but thinking about where , where is your time best spent one interesting thing to kind of think along with that, we did a , a fee survey this past fall for 2020. And I think we surveyed over 1600 different financial advisors. And we asked them a lot of things like, are they charging for planning and what's their fees? And, you know, are they doing a separate fee or hourly fee or subscription, but the feed average fee for those that were charging a separate fee for plans was $2,482 there in 2020, which is up nearly 50% since 2015. So we're seeing first firstly, more and more people charging that separate fee, I guess, is there a better able to communicate the value of the plan? And of course the fee itself continued to increase hourly fees were up about 25% over that same time period at about $257 an hour. So, you know, all that to say, it really seems to lend itself to thinking through, okay, what is my highest and best use where's my time best spent. And to Bill's point it's, in our opinion, we strongly feel it's in the presentation of the plan where, you know, your advice and solutions are really brought to light using a lot of the engaging tools inside of money guide, but in a , not to mention that what were seen as some of the average costs or hourly rates, or even subscription fees that some advisors are, are putting forward, lend itself to , to allow him to , to engage a paraplanner, to help with some of that more keyboard centric type type of work that's required to get plans entered. Okay .
Speaker 3And the other thing we've , we've seen as we work through plans with, with advisors is that there generally is a return on investment. When the advisor works closely with the client, as they go through the planning process, they're typically able to uncover assets that they previously didn't know about. And as they work with the client on those assets and create a holistic plan, that could be, you know , that covers everything. They hold internal at that particular firm, as well as other firms that are able to gather assets, which again , uh , increases revenue for, for the FFA and is , is , is a return on the investment.
Speaker 2And that reminds me of a firm as a BD, I believe started to track , uh, of the assets that were entered in a financial plan for their firm. What percentage of them were assets that were under management versus held away? And so they determined over a , I think it was a 10 month period. There were $16 billion in the financial plans that they had created. 10 billion of the 16 were held away assets. And it really helped to prove to them, at least one of the many potential values of doing a plan is uncovering those assets, right? Clients are more motivated then to really disclose those so they can get their true probability of success for their plan. There there's one other firms I'll throw out there, an example of kind of the ROI of, of planning. And they started to track two different groups of financial advisors , uh , one group at their firm that , uh, advisors that was not offering planning at all to their clients. And then another group that was doing 10 or more plans a year. Okay. So not a huge number and huge requirement. I mean, essentially a plan a month or more right. What they saw from between the two groups is that those doing 10 or more plans a year saw a 56% increase in their revenue. And largely it's because again, we're disclosing those assets, but we've, we also find that advisors that are , uh, positioning some of their financial solutions in the context of a plan clients find much more , uh , trust in, in seeing that as a kind of a needs based , uh , proposal of a solution, as opposed to maybe more of a back of the envelope type of calculation of, of a certain need. So, you know, all that to say, it seems like the , the more plans that are created, the evidence backs up the fact that it's improving the results for the advisors doing so.
Speaker 3And that really backs up our philosophy around the paraplanning service and planning services as a whole helping advisors put that together, put plans together so that they have the time , uh , for the presentation, they have the time to recruit more clients. And then the more plans they do, the more assets they potentially uncover and the closer they are with their clients. And they're not spending the time entering the data, they're actually spending quality time with their clients and able to schedule throughout the year different, critical touch points so that they can, they can continue to work closely with their clients face to face or, or by zoom these days, or , you know , uh , teams. So , um, it enables the , the FAA to develop that close relationship, even closer relationship with the client because they have more touch points
Speaker 2Or even the client's kids too. Right? As we think about, you know , the baby boomers are retiring now for, for several years , uh , preparing for that wealth transfer that will inevitably happen. Having those relationships with the adult children of those clients is going to be really important and a great way to do it. A great excuse to reach out to those folks as , Hey , you know , I'm now offering planning for, you know, all my clients or even all the children of my existing clients and , uh , having a pair of planning service available like this really makes that, that scalable and actionable
Speaker 3And many advisors are proactively thinking about that and, and having the time to talk with clients and their children and creating that generational succession plan, if you will creating those touch points so that they can stay in touch with the entire family as their financial life and financial journey moves forward down the path.
Speaker 1Well, everybody, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks bill and Matt for sharing your perspectives around paraplanning and planning services.
Speaker 3Yeah. Thanks Matt for joining us. Um, and , and thank you to everyone. Who's listening to this podcast. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to give us a ring, but we'll be more than happy to help in any way we can.
Speaker 1If you'd like to learn more, you can visit our website at www oyster, llc.com or call 8 0 4 9 6 5 5 4 0 0. If you'd like to learn more about the information Matt shared, please visit money guide pro.com. Have a great day. Thanks for listening. And if you like what you heard, make sure to follow the oyster stew podcast on whatever platform you listen to. If you'd like to learn how we can help firms start, run, protect, and grow their business, visit our website@oysterllc.com.