Category: Bob Veres’ Blog

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…

Some years back, as a standard part of my industry presentations, I would ask the audience how many of them would, if they could, go back to where they were 10 or 15 years ago, career-wise or, for that matter, life-wise.   Very rarely would a hand go up.  And then I would draw the obvious conclusion: 10-15 years of change have been beneficial to you in your career and in your life—all of you, without exception.  And yet we instinctively fear and avoid change in our lives, preferring where we are now to where we could be if we…

I’m writing a new version of the Custodial Alternatives white paper, which profiles some less-well-known options that advisory firms caught up in the Schwabitrade acquisition, or firms that are suffering long hold times, could consider.  In that context, I’m also thinking about how digital onboarding is becoming more seamless and, if Nest Wealth is a harbinger of things to come (see previous article), much more convenient for advisors and clients to navigate. The key takeaway is that changing custodians, and repapering clients, is becoming less painful—and easier to contemplate.  Following this logic a bit further, we might see custodial relationships…

I’m beginning to think the term ‘compliance’ ought to be repurposed.  To simply ‘comply’ with legal and regulatory guidelines is not exactly a lofty standard, yet that’s the term that broker-dealers and wirehouse firms have adopted, and it seems to be the term preferred by the our regulatory friends over at the SEC.  Maybe you see something different, but from where I sit, there is no actual encouragement from federal regulators to go beyond (somewhat grudging) compliance and embrace higher standards. Like fiduciary, for example.  Recently, we heard compelling evidence that the SEC wants to downplay the fiduciary concept among…

You may have read about a recent ruling by a Superior Court judge in Georgia who discovered what I think we all knew: that FINRA runs its arbitration system like a kangaroo court, putting its thumb firmly on the side of the scales of justice that benefit its member brokerage firms.  I think it’s long past time for the financial planning community—and anybody who cares about protecting consumers—to call for an end to the arbitration agreements that the brokerage firms routinely had to their clients.  I could be talked into letting them require arbitration agreements, but only if the forum…

I was talking with Knut Rostad, founder of the Institute for the Fiduciary Standard, about his recent conversations with people at the SEC.  He is cautiously optimistic that the “new SEC” is, for pretty much the first time in his career, open to hearing about how a fiduciary standard for all advice givers would be a significant step forward in consumer protection.  But he is also getting feedback that nobody at the top wants to alienate the staff—and the SEC staffers have mostly been hired by SEC leaders—going back 20+ years—who have been far more sympathetic to protecting wirehouse profit…