Bluerating | December 2021
Every year FINER conducts ongoing monitoring on over 7.000 financial professionals: financial advisors, private bankers, and bank managers.
Their service models show some meaningful differences.
Firstly, the contract which binds financial professionals to the bank: the difference between being an advisor with a mandate or an employee changes the outlook of both professional figures entirely.
On the one hand, financial advisors choose to bet on their skills and to question themselves to the point where they do not rely on the bank for remuneration anymore.
And this makes the financial advisor an entrepreneur of sorts, even though the financial advisor too operates through a mandate and with a bank or financial network that regulates their relationship with clients.
On the other hand, bank employees have a lower level of autonomy of choosing, for examples, which products and solutions to offer their clients.
The issues linked to products and budgets is lived with more urgency by bank employees, although it concerns both professional figures.
A second point of difference is the level of digitalization of the bank and the tools provided to bank employees.
Accustomed to operating offsite, financial advisors can count on advanced digital platforms and tools in the management of their relationship with both clients and banks/financial networks.
This makes the job of financial advisor much easier. In fact, being able to count on simple and efficient processes allows financial advisors to dedicate more energy and time to clients.
The number of bank employees is ten times higher than the number of financial advisors with an active mandate. However, current trends are quite disconcerting: while the number of financial advisors is stable or slightly on the increase, the number of bank employees is free falling.
The data collected by FINER confirm that the sentiment on career perspectives and the future of the bank among advisors and employees is quite different.
Only 54% of bank employees sees their professional future with optimism, as compared to 88% of financial advisors.
Only 29% of bank employees is fully satisfied with their bank, as compared to 56% of financial advisors.
However, the percentage of bankers who considers the passage from employee to financial advisor as an opportunity is surprisingly decreasing: 50% in 2019, 45% in 2020, 32% in 2021.
Maybe the fear of making the wrong choice prevails over courage? Then, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?
If this is the case, why complaining about a job instead of changing it?
Nicola Ronchetti