What has changed is that you need to work harder than in the low volatility, zero-rate years to demonstrate your value and prove all this to your clients.
What can you do? You can talk to them about inflation – the real cost of staying in cash. Sure, clients can get more on their savings these days, but their spending power is being reduced day in, day out, and where’s the growth going to come from?
You can use digital engagement to get clients thinking about risk and reward. A simple invitation to update an online risk profile is a great catalyst for a conversation.
Experience tells us that people who have invested for a while tend to get more comfortable with risk over time, so clients may even find they are happy to take on more risk than previously, supporting you to make the case that sitting on the sidelines is not in their best interests.
You can also use cash flow planning tools onscreen to bring clients back to their long-term goals and get them focused on their underlying needs and objectives.
Cash flow modelling is a powerful way to demonstrate the range of outcomes that can be achieved through investing, versus the certainty of losing money in real terms in the bank.
Despite global uncertainty and the pressure of high inflation, the investment landscape in 2023 has been better than many feared and multi-asset performance has been tracking up for the last six months.
Dynamic Planner Risk Profile 5 returned more than 7 per cent in the year to September, and Risk Profile 7 returned close to 10 per cent – both ahead of CPI inflation of 6.7 per cent over the period.
Even with the best deals, and with their money locked up for long periods, clients could not have achieved these levels of return through savings.
So what’s the problem? It is that investing right now does not feel good.
But as someone reminded me recently, there is no referee who is going to blow a whistle and say, 'Okay, the stock market’s going to go up now, come back in'.
Supporting both new and existing clients to understand that, to see that it’s not about this moment in time but about their goals for the future, is a powerful way to add value.
Ben Goss is chief executive of Dynamic Planner
