Developing alternative and non-traditional ways of reaching and engaging clients is a key step in providing effective post-retirement advice, the managing director of State Super Financial Services (SSFS), Michael Monaghan. says.
Monaghan says it’s important advisers understand that the emotional needs of clients after they retire are often very different from when they’re in the accumulation phase, and that advisers tailor their services accordingly.
He says that “pretty much all” of SSFS’s clients are in their post-retirement phase.
“The big issues are around how we segment them into different behavioural types and deliver the advice to them in a way that they want to use it, the channel they want to use,” he says.
Traditionally face-to-face
“Traditionally we’ve been face-to-face in our business, sitting across the desk from the client giving comprehensive advice. What we’re finding is there’s an increasing number of people who are either happy to get advice bit by bit, rather than comprehensive advice; and/or self-serve. They’re happy to do it over the phone and they’re happy to use technology to do it.
“One of our big challenges is a) segmenting clients, and thinking about how they would like to interact; and then b) creating the capability – the people capability and the technology capability – to deliver a broader range of methods than we’ve used to date.
“What we’re talking about now is those who do not want to see us physically, or come to a seminar, how they want to see us. It’s gearing up to use technology more effectively to enable them to cost-effectively and productively use our services.”
Monaghan will be a panellist at the Conexus Financial Post Retirement Conference in Sydney on March 4, as part of a session on education and advice solutions. Other panellists are Lukasz De Pourbaix, general manager of investment consulting for Lonsec Research; Matt Englund, managing director of Securitor & Licensee Select at BT Financial Group; James Grant, executive manager of wealth management for Industry Fund Services; and Matt Lawler, chief executive officer of Yellow Brick Road Wealth Management.
The conference will provide insights and the latest thinking from leading financial planning figures on crafting effective post-retirement advice solutions.
Effective segmentation
Monaghan says client base segmentation does not have to be too fine in order for it to be effective.
“We think in a very broad sense about the sort of stuff that Andrew Inwood from CoreData talks about – the DIY people, the coach-seekers and the outsourcers.
“People who want to do it yourself are more likely to self-serve and they’re more likely to want things one piece at a time – you know, I just want to know about this today.
“The outsourcers are more likely to say, you guys just cover everything for me and I’ll come back on a regular basis and keep in touch and just make sure I’m OK.
“And that’s most of our client base today, in that outsourcer category. And we’ll be looking to extend into some of those other areas.
“In reality, I think people will cross over between different channels.”
Monaghan says it’s too early to say yet which channel clients might prefer.
“We’ve got quite a bit of investment to do to crate the capability over the next 12 months or so,” he says.
Different needs
Monaghan says delivering advice and providing education to clients in the post-retirement phase is significantly different from providing it in the accumulation phase.
“When people are in the accumulation phase, when they’re in their 40s or something like that, there’s two things that are different,” he says.
“One is they’re generally at work, so they have a network, somewhere to go – to the HR manager or their boss, somewhere like that – if they’ve got worries about their future. The second thing is if things go wrong on the financial front, they’ve got time to recover. They can put more money in, and so forth.
“When people have retired, if things go wrong they have got very little fallback. So the type of advice, the type of approach that you have to take is much more about dealing with their anxieties about whether they’ll have enough and what happens when things go wrong – trying to avoid them being too cautious when things do go wrong.”
