After a considerable period when many financial planners have been focused on compliance and technical skills, the managing director of Securitor and Licensee Select for BT Financial Group, Matt Englund, says it’s time they were reminded of the value of the “soft” skills that go along with the job.
Particularly when it comes to dealing with clients nearing or in retirement, Englund says, it’s vital that planners be able to empathise and to relate to clients in a way that is different to how they relate to clients in the accumulation phase of their financial lifecycle.
Describing the skills possessed by the best financial planners as “soft” can be misleading – employed correctly, they are simply a way of translating the emotional needs and the goals of post-retirement clients into the hard-edged financial strategies needed to match them.
Englund says the concept of “retirement” looks different to different people, and financial planners need to be adaptable so they can “interpret” and accommodate a range of client needs.
Englund will be a panellist at the Conexus Financial Post Retirement Conference in Sydney on March 4, as part of a session on post-retirement education and advice solutions.
Other panellists are Lukasz De Pourbaix, general manager of investment consulting for Lonsec Research; James Grant, executive manager of wealth management for Industry Fund Services; Michael Monaghan, managing director of State Super Financial Services; and Matt Lawler, chief executive officer of Yellow Brick Road Wealth Management.
(You can follow the links above to read each panellist’s views on the major challenges and issues involve in providing effective post-retirement advice and education solutions.)
Englund says that it’s becoming less and less usual for someone to “work until age 63, 65, end work on one day and start this next phase of their lives” the very next day.
“Far more people are shifting to moving to part-time work and consulting work and then into a phase there they are not in paid employment, but they are still doing things that they would consider to be meaningful and important,” Englund says.
Advice strategies need to take these things into account and managing the transition require more than just the technical skills that planners pride themselves on.
Englund says BT has an established program of “reinforcing the soft skills that our best advisers have, and creating an environment where those [skills] are repeatable across a practice, and trainable across a practice”.
Technical skills remain critical – a hygiene factor, Englund says – but they need to be supplemented with a range of non-technical skills, so the emotional needs to post-retirement clients are met as effectively as the financial ones.
“In a post-retirement world, a concentration on strategic asset allocation [where] we get a single risk profile for the total risk of the client, has passed,” Englund says.
“What we’re seeing much more of is risk-based management of pools of assets that are required for different phases of life.”
And beginning the retirement conversation with clients early is an essential part of helping clients through their various life stages. He says raising the issue of or starting to plan for retirement when a client is 55 can be too late – the conversation ideally has to start at least 20 years earlier than that.
