Bluerating | November 2023
Everyone should have a financial advisor who, in addition to managing assets, deals with issues pertaining to protection and credit, both at the household level and – for entrepreneurs – at a corporate level.
Finding a professional with expertise is hard. In fact, building a solid relationship of trust takes years: leading professionals invest heavily to enhance their competence and skills and it take several years of hard work for their efforts to be recognized and appreciated.
Ensuring access to financial consultancy applied to social security and credit to everyone regardless of their capital level is quite an intriguing idea.
Intriguing but unsustainable, since not everyone would be able to remunerate financial professionals adequately; in turn, with due exceptions, financial professionals would hardly forego the right recognition and remuneration in exchange for their job.
The situation in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the UK in particular, can be quite enlightening: there, the RDR banned incentives on products and underlined the importance of remuneration in exchange for financial consultancy; thus, thousands of clients were left without a financial advisor and several financial advisors without a job.
Only the financial professionals with the highest level of expertise were able to obtain recognition for their job from their most demanding clients, who could pay adequate fees.
But not all is lost for those who did not wish or could pay consultancy fees. First of all, there is a rising awareness that managing one’s assets requires time and planning.
Time and planning required for any other household activity, from the daily management of the house to planning the children’s study, the payment of utilities, taxes, or the use of credit.
Nobody has been left behind: each individual has chosen the most suitable channel to their needs both in terms of time and in terms of money.
In the UK, several financial advisors had to give up personal consulting after the entry into force of the RDR, especially the youngest. However, they found an alternative in offering their consultancy services through platforms accessible to most people.
The increased range of channels that allow access to platforms and the massive spread of digital devices such as smartphones has transformed our habits over the past 10 years.
Almost nobody could have imagined that businesses such as Amazon, Netflix and Airbnb would have altered our habits so radically. And yet, it happened.
The same will happen in the world of financial consultancy, albeit with one important difference, that is the current players of the sectors will most likely be the ones to open new channels and launch new alternative consultancy models.
However, the new channels and service models will not replace financial consultancy conducted by the financial professional; instead, they will make consultancy available to those who cannot afford it.
This is true democracy, made possible by private sustainable investments, which will foster industrialization and make the basic consultancy model accessible to all.
For advanced consultancy, valuable advisors wanted.
Nicola Ronchetti