Category: Bob Veres’ Blog

This is the time of year when the various industry magazines come out with their broker-dealer surveys, listing the ‘top’ BD rankings based on total revenues or the number of ‘producing’ reps.  In the accompanying articles, you will read how the ‘top’ broker-dealers are not really in the sales business anymore; they are now becoming national advisory firms. I completely get why they would tell this to credulous writers; the public has increasingly shifted away from any taint of ‘sales’ in an advisor relationship, and the concept of hiring an advisor who puts their clients’ interests first (even if most…

We all like to know who are the real up-and-comers in our profession, the younger career financial planners who are exhibiting strong professional leadership skills and extraordinary talents.  Every so often one or the other of the professional magazines will give us a ’40 under 40’ list of candidates to watch for in the future, and I have to admit that I can’t resist looking at the list.   And it turns out that all of the future leaders of the financial planning profession are wirehouse brokers. Wait; what?!? I no longer summarize the articles in Financial Planning magazine, because…

This newsletter issue is mostly about technology and new fintech solutions, which is something I’ve followed for (believe it or not) roughly 41 years.  I go back so far that I wrote about the very first financial planning software programs: Financial Profiles, Leonard Systems, IFDS, PLANMAN, etc.  I wrote the very first tech survey when Barry Vinocur, then editor of Investment Advisor magazine, discovered that I was keeping a running spreadsheet of the various tech solutions in the 1990s—because so many people were asking me about this or that program.  I think back then the article included just a couple…

You never hear anyone talk (or write) about this, but it’s really stunning how often the financial planning profession has been, and is, ahead of the curve in the evolution of our social environment. For example?  Some of us remember that the consumer revolution, which phased out salespeople and put the consumer in charge of selecting purchases based on price and quality, was very slow to enter the financial services world.  The leading tip of the spear was the first fee-only financial planners, who publicly and even defiantly sat on the same side of the table with their clients.  Instead…

As you know, I read the trade magazines (including online sources like Advisor Perspectives and kitces.com) and report on the various articles,.  This gives me some insight not only into trends in the profession, but into the reporting on them.   Recently, I’ve noticed an area where there is a huge trend but the reporting has been unusually timid: clients are increasingly politically polarized, and increasingly strident and insistent on their political beliefs.  Many advisors don’t know what to do when the conversation keeps being pulled away from planning into politics.  There are now, for the first time in my…

In a couple of weeks, I’m going to be flying to Seattle to attend the Financial Planning Association’s 2022 national conference—my first in six or seven years.  Back then, I moved around from session to session to session, taking copious notes of everything that was said, and came back with… nothing.  There was nothing in the notes that was worth reporting to my audience.  The most important insight I came away with was how many attendees were complaining about the poor quality of the presentations and the overall lack of organization that was everywhere visible at the conference. That sums…

One of the toughest parts about being a writer is trying to have an opinion at least once or twice a month.  Having interacted with some of you, that doesn’t seem to be a problem for everybody.  But after 40 years, it starts to present some challenges. Fortunately, my community is usually ready to step up with some assistance in this department.  At the recent Insider’s Forum conference, the number one topic of worried conversation was not the markets, succession planning, or politics.  People were discussing the growing flood of private equity money into the financial planning ecosystem, funding advisory…

I n our upcoming Insider’s Forum conference, which is just days away as you read this, we’ll be doing things you won’t see at other industry meetings.  One of them is exploring a few of the huge tectonic trends in the profession, starting with the past, taking them up to the present, and then extrapolating where that momentum is taking us in the future—not only so that we can prepare for the next iteration of the profession, but also so that we can become leaders for positive change.  (Our conference ‘niche’ or ‘target market’ is advisors who accept the responsibility…

If you’re as old as Methuselah, like I am, you might remember a pivotal moment in the evolution of the planning profession, when Forbes magazine noticed that brokers, life insurance and tax shelter salespeople were starting to call themselves ‘financial planners.’  Many of them were creating financial plans, using computer programs where they would carefully enter a client’s detailed financial information, and no matter what client data was typed into those fields, the output, in the form of a very professional-looking financial plan, would strongly recommend that the customer put his/her entire investment portfolio in the stocks that the broker…