Advice businesses should work to establish an individual brand identity to attract the right clients and reassure current clients.
At a roundtable hosted by British fintech platform Intelliflo in Sydney, Finura Group co-founder and managing director Peter Worn said he expected to see advisers “continue to invest more in their own individual brand identities”.
“One of the things about our first wave of cloud social technologies is you can really build a brand quite quickly through social media,” Worn said.
“I think you need to just assume, as advisers, like we did with the internet, just assume that information arbitrage is no longer a competition advantage. Information itself is not what you do. The ability to convince people to do things that they don’t always want to do is what makes you a great adviser.”
Forming and promoting an individual identity that will be recognisable to potential clients could help to grow and attract suitable clients.
“With advisers, encourage them to get that brand out there, own their niche for who they are,” Worn said.
Self-employed financial adviser Adele Martin told the roundtable there needs to be a person or a brand to help gain trust from clients and investors, especially if businesses intend to scale.
“If we are going to go to some sort of scale solution, I think you need to have some sort of brand or person with it in order to get that trust in buying,” Martin said.
“We’ve seen that with finfluencers, but we’ve seen it with Apple and Steve Jobs…I think you get more trust and buy in [when] you’ve got someone associated with [it].”
‘Finfluencers’, a form of social media influencer providing free financial advice, have naturally built in brands despite being controversial among advisers.
Policy advocate Keddie Waller agreed having a person or a brand attached was important because “if you can’t humanise it, you can’t trust it”.
“There’s definitely an issue with the sector not actually positioning itself and showing the value of advice [to clients],” Waller said.
Waller and Adviser Ratings managing director Angus Woods agreed the advice industry was guilty of talking inwardly.
Despite the benefits of having an established brand, the roundtable agreed there is not yet one in financial advice in Australia.
The issue of a career pipeline and lack of new talent coming in was also discussed at the roundtable as demand for advice outstrips the number of new advisers.
“How do we actually think about the next generation of advisers and building this as an attractive profession to then better service the community, that’s a challenge we should be thinking about,” Waller said.
“We’ve got to change how we actually attract. We’ve got to change the pathways. We’ve got to change the experience.”
Waller said universities were pulling out the sector and that three had pulled out the last fortnight, resulting in fewer pathways for a smaller pipeline.
If advice businesses have distinctive, established brands, they could potentially attract more students and increase the supply of new advisers to meet growing demand.
Other professions such as law or consulting have certain firms that are household names and consequently attract university or school students.
