The underserved

The following is an edited transcript of a March 7 webcast, “New-Wave Prospecting for Advisers,” moderated by InvestmentNews deputy editors Evan Cooper and Frederick P. Gabriel Jr., and technology reporter Davis D. Janowski.

InvestmentNews: Rob, give us a snapshot of Personal Capital Corp.

Mr. Foregger: Sure. Personal Capital is a new, next-generation financial adviser with the objective of delivering wealth management for the Internet age.

Basically, we’re attempting to build one of the first truly personalized, scalable financial services companies in America, delivering both the high-tech and a high-touch wealth management experience to the mass affluent and the low end of the high-net-worth market.

Our business has been built on two key themes: the digital and the personal.

In terms of digital, like the moves from banking to online banking and from traditional brokerage to online brokerage, we think there is now a shift from the traditional delivery of advisory services to electronic delivery of those services.

And in terms of the personal delivery of advice, the shift over the last five years really has been driven by mobile, which has made everything more personalized — whether that’s personalized social or professional networks, personalized radio and other media, or even things like personalized tailored shirts, so why not personalized financial services?

InvestmentNews: Trent, give us an idea of what Veritat is doing.

Mr. Porter: At Veritat, our focus is making the adviser’s job easy, simply by the fact that our technology does all the heavy lifting. We have a Turbo Tax-style system that allows clients to put in their data; advisers are able to review automatically generated planning documents and are even given dial controls to make adjustments as needed. And the platform automatically schedules follow-up meetings, it creates execution steps, takes care of portfolio management, and our advisers have a level of flexibility that’s not common in traditional advising roles.

By being given the ability to choose to meet with our clients in person or remotely with an online video meeting room, we can extend or pass our circle of influence beyond that geographic limitation. Our platform allows us to really take advantage of that fact when advisers are able to open up their prospecting areas.

InvestmentNews: Frank, tell us about MyNewFinancialAdvisor.com.

Mr. Troise: Basically, our value proposition is that for the cost of a cup of coffee a day, we are directing mass-affluent leads to advisers, so we are basically prospecting, qualifying and directing folks with $250,000 to $3 million of investible assets to advisers. Our customers are independent registered investment advisers at The Charles Schwab Corp., TD Ameritrade Inc., LPL Financial LLC, Fidelity Investments, independent broker-dealers and community banks.

FEEDING MECHANISM

InvestmentNews: Is it fair to say that you are sort of a feeding mechanism for advisers?

Mr. Troise: Yes. I like to use the elevator pitch that we are very similar to WebMD.

I don’t mean to denigrate what we do as a profession, but clients have a good intuitive sense of what their problems are. The reality is that for 90% of the questions they need answered, there are some terrific tools out there that can do it.

It’s sort of like WebMD. If my kid gets a cold, I can go online and diagnose it. But when it comes to me getting a prescription, I’m going to walk into a doctor’s office to do that.

So we view our value as being on the front end. How much of that workload can we take off the adviser’s desk? Candidly, the majority of it could be considered a commodity — pre-qualify that lead and put an adviser in a position where we can tell him, “Hey, here is John Doe. He’s got $2.5 million in investible assets. He has some significant questions regarding his kid’s 529s and he wants to talk to you.”

InvestmentNews: Rob and Trent, Frank outlined how his firm works with advisers. How do your offerings work with advisers, and what can advisers specifically get out of what you offer? Let’s start with Rob.

Mr. Foregger: We are a financial adviser, so our platform is not available to other financial advisers. But there is interest among advisers about our business model.

InvestmentNews: Might what you do help advisers who are looking for an alternative source of advice for clients or prospects who they can’t or don’t want to serve themselves?

Mr. Foregger: What we offer is free to anybody, and there’s obviously no investment required or subscription fees to use our core software service. So anyone — advisers or investors — who want to get a better handle on what’s going on with their finances can use it.

There is also an opportunity — which we haven’t formalized yet — for us to work with advisers to accept what I’ll call their down- market leads. Many advisers want to work with clients who have $1 million to a few million dollars in investible assets, and our sweet spot is between $100,000 and $1 million in investible assets.

InvestmentNews: Once investors are comfortable with your technology, isn’t it likely that they then might want to form a relationship with an adviser?

Mr. Foregger: Yes. A core part of what we are trying to do is to build a personalized financial service that, initially, is free of charge.

Our mantra is to be able to advise before we manage, or to at least allow the user to see what they’ll get before we ask to manage their money. And that’s a very different model.

Having spent the last 20 years in the financial services industry, the traditional model is to market to the client or market to the lead, bring the lead in, open up the account and then provide the services.

We are essentially putting a lot of those services outside of the traditional money management service, and putting advice first and foremost in the user experience. Essentially, we want to provide very deep, rich financial interaction long before we ask to manage the client’s money.

SUPPORT FOR ADVISERS

InvestmentNews: Trent, give us an idea of where you fit in with advisers and how they can use your service.

Mr. Porter: Sure. We’re actually bringing on advisers to become investment adviser representatives of our firm — to work as independent contractors with their own practices but with our support and under our umbrella.

They’re able to utilize the increased efficiency of our platform to help them serve a greater audience. The increased efficiency allows for a much lower price point, so they can really meet that middle market. Our advisers are spending less than an hour per quarter with the average client. Since there is a much bigger ability to serve those clients, it makes it profitable to reach that middle market.

InvestmentNews: How do you work with an adviser from a cost point of view?

Mr. Porter: It’s just a simple revenue-sharing arrangement, where our advisers are billing with our flat fees. We simply take a small percentage of that, and the rest goes to the adviser.

InvestmentNews: Frank, can you tell us about your business model and the cost to advisers for these lead services?

Mr. Troise: Our only value-add in this is to ensure that that end user is opting in and saying, “I want to talk to an adviser.”

So for $2.50 a day, we are putting advisers in a position where we are saying: “Look, we are fishing in these large ponds.” Keep in mind, 10,000 boomers are retiring every day for the next 10 years, and when you look at the demographics, it’s a massive marketing opportunity.

What we’ve been able to do is to leverage relationships we have with the custodial platforms, independent broker-dealers and the community banks so we [figuratively] can walk in and say, “Here’s John Doe. He’s got $2 million; he wants to talk to an adviser. Here you go.”

And that, economically, stops right there. We are not participating with that client post-facto, and from that point on, if it’s an institution like LPL or TD, it’s up to them and their advisers to decide what they want to do with that client.

InvestmentNews: And how does the baby boomer who is looking for help know that there is such a thing as MyNewFinancialAdvisor.com in the first place?

Mr. Troise: There’s two tracks that we are looking at.

For one, we have several campaigns out there; we’ve been very blessed with our advisory board and our management.

Santa Barbara County, Calif., where I live, ironically is the epicenter of affiliate marketing. As a result, we’ve been able to put out some really good strategic campaigns where we’ve been testing retirement planning, stress-test analysis and educational analysis, so people are hearing about us as a function of these campaigns.

DELIVERING THE GOODS

As a result of the tests, we’re going through a process where we generate deliverables. For example, someone could be on their iPhone from Grand Central Station to Stamford, Conn., and in that 45-minute ride on the train, they could be getting 15 reports delivered to them as a PDF file.

And again, on our end, what we are trying to do is to then say, “OK, we have all of these leads — where do we put them?” At the same time, one thing that has also gotten a lot of traction is that we can do a tremendous number of these reports — along any dimension of planning — for a significant volume.

We now have subscribers, as we refer to them, putting out banner ads and text links and going to their centers of influence and saying: “Hey, do you want an educational analysis? Rather than that costing you $1,500, click on this link and it will lead you to a template that our firm knows; our compliance department has already approved it.”

That puts the adviser in a position where they are going into a certified public accountant’s office and already creating a value proposition for free.

InvestmentNews: Each of these services has a financial planning component. How robust are your financial planning tools, compared with those that advisers use — which typically involve expensive, traditional financial planning software? How do they compare?

Mr. Porter: Ours is on par with or exceeds any of those. Even though it’s very efficient, intuitive and easy to use, it’s very advanced and comprehensive. We’re able to provide clients — regardless of income — with a detailed financial plan that’s right on par with what they’d get at any other adviser.

InvestmentNews: Rob?

Mr. Foregger: I believe we offer a very sophisticated service that has a slightly different focus. It’s not necessarily around the financial plan, but total wealth management. We are looking at everything, aggregating a client’s banking accounts and their credit, as well as their long-term investment accounts.

We’re attempting to do a holistic look at the client and focus on that. And then obviously, we can drill in on the investment side. We have a very sophisticated, free analysis capability online that is even able to [analyze] individual mutual funds inside of a client’s holdings to get a very detailed and sophisticated view of what their true asset allocation looks like.

InvestmentNews: Most pre-retirees wonder: “Do I have enough?” Meaning, do they have enough money to retire in the way that they think they need, and provide the lifestyle that they would like to have or think they are going to have in retirement? Would you say that each of the services provides that kind of answer to a very common question?

Mr. Troise: What we’re been talking about, for all intents and purposes, is a cash flow analysis.

And the reality is that the baby boomer today is upside down. I think that each of us recognizes the fact that advisers are having more of an income-and-expense discussion with the end-user.

We found that it’s important simply to triage and diagnose the problem, because the boomer already knows it. They’re already telling you that they are concerned about being able to put their kids through college and concerned about their job not giving them a cost-of-living adjustment that actually covers the increased cost of living.

Our job is to make sure that the value proposition for the adviser is strong enough. For instance, we could be directing a client towards Trent and saying, “The client is 80% of the way there, but guess what? They really need that deep dive now in terms of your planning tools to take them to the next step.”

QUESTION ABOUT NUMBERS

InvestmentNews: Here is a question from the audience for Frank. For the price of the daily cup of coffee that you mentioned, how many names — with contact information — are provided per contract period?

Mr. Troise: Right now, we are on the subscription path — it’s unlimited. In terms of what we are seeing per week, we are seeing between $6 million to $7 million in Southern California alone, and we are finding now that when advisers join our platform — and I’m not exaggerating this data point — within 72 hours they break even.

We are that confident in our value proposition. As goofy as this sounds, we literally have a money-back guarantee, saying, “Look, we’ll buy you the cup of coffee next time to make it even.” But we are finding now that within the first two weeks, the adviser breaks even. And more importantly, the adviser is actually getting that annuity stream for the rest of the client relationship.

InvestmentNews: Frank, how do you distribute the leads? How do you decide which adviser gets which leads?

Mr. Troise: In our subscriber model, we have advisers coming to us, saying: “Look, I want to put banner ads on my site saying, “Free education plan, free retirement plan, free stress test plan.’”

We view ourselves as just an engine. So we’re saying to the adviser: “We don’t care if one person comes through looking for that education analysis, or 10,000 come through.”

An internal metric we have is, we want to be able to return the money to the end-user via a qualified review within 20 minutes.

A MIX OF ADVISERS

InvestmentNews: Trent, do you find that many of the advisers that you are adding to Veritat already have an established practice, and are looking to expand it through networking? And if they join your own practice, must they have an exclusive arrangement with you or can they continue in business on their own, as well?

Mr. Porter: It is an exclusive arrangement, and what we are seeing is a combination of both.

We are seeing some stay-at-home parents that are well-credentialed at previous careers; they like the flexibility of our platform. We are also seeing folks that maybe work in a broker-dealer or insurance environment wanting to transition to fee-only, and they are bringing clients over with them. So we are getting a little bit of everything.

InvestmentNews: Are the advisers that end up joining Veritat required to be certified financial planners? Is there a minimum qualification they must have?

Mr. Porter: We encourage the CFP designation, which a lot of our advisers have, but the minimum requirement is a Series 65 license.

InvestmentNews: Can we go a bit further into the initial planning that is involved at each of your organizations?

Frank, you have a partnership with eMoney, but does the survey that the end-investor takes through MyNewFinancialAdvisor.com leverage any of eMoney’s technologies? Is it internally developed? Is it some other product that is off the shelf, in terms of a financial planning suite?

Mr. Troise: We made a very quick decision in terms of the “build it or buy it.” We reached out to eMoney because we had a very high opinion of their product.

The key to this is that we are utilizing the standard assumptions. Because of that, we have the ability to talk to an LPL, for example, and say, “Look, these are the standard actuarial assumptions. Everything in here is the same Monte Carlo simulations that you guys use.”

That puts the adviser in a position where there are no curveballs, there is no inflation assumption that’s off the wall. Again, we could be directing leads to Rob or to Trent; they know what the numbers are. They know what those asset class returns are going to be.

InvestmentNews: Frank, are you providing individual leads to individual advisers or do you provide one lead to a bunch of advisers?

Mr. Troise: It’s all of the above. One of the things that we are looking at now is the possibility of talking to the custodial platforms about perhaps directing leads to the mother ship, and have the leads pre-populated down to an adviser’s local customer relationship management system.

That would put the adviser in a position where they’re turning on their computer and finding 14 new leads within a 40-mile radius of their ZIP code, sorted by first name, last name, and with a PDF copy of a report they just did about a particular issue to which the lead may be responding. And more importantly, they want to talk to you. They are expecting your call.

We are hoping to do that in the next six months.

InvestmentNews: A question has come in from the audience about whether some of these ideas tend to disintermediate the adviser. The services provided by Rob and Trent, for example, seem to be taking the place of advisers to some degree.

Gentlemen, what is your response to that?

Mr. Foregger: We are an adviser. So I guess I would say that we are similar to any other adviser who is in the asset-gathering business. That is our core business. We happen to be doing it through having developed a sophisticated online platform for users to come in and test-drive before they buy.

InvestmentNews: Some of the questions coming from advisers are about a kind of either/or state: either your clients get advice from an adviser or do it themselves.

Rob, your service probably would take a cut out of the middle. So it’s advice from an adviser, but it’s through an electronic medium.

One of the stories that we ran recently was about research indicating that clients are actually all of the above, rather than one or the other. In other words, many of them — probably to the chagrin of their advisers — are not just advisory clients but have their own direct accounts, as well as a number of advised accounts.

Rob, where do you think your service fits in the spectrum of service options in which people are likely to have several accounts with many kinds of providers?

A RANGE OF CHOICE

Mr. Foregger: For most clients, it’s all of the above — depending on where they are in their life, depending even on what account they have or the nature of the goal they are investing for.

What we have done is create an agnostic platform that is really all about putting the client truly in the middle and having any of the financial service providers, including us, be part of their custodial structure or the service structure for the client. The client is always in the middle, and all of the financial service providers are on the outside of that circle. And that’s really a fundamental shift in how financial services are generally provided today. I view it as a post-product world structure for the financial services industry.

InvestmentNews: Rob, can you give a brief overview of the initial technology that will confront the investor accessing Personal Capital? Is it a tool that you guys built yourselves, in terms of the wizard or the framework that they are following on their own, or is it something off the shelf that you guys have adapted?

Mr. Foregger: It’s a hybrid, for sure. It’s a little of everything. On the front end, we use account aggregation, which is a core piece of what we do. We use Yodlee for that service. But we’ve essentially built our own data operation structure on top of Yodlee, not just to control the user experience but also to allow us the flexibility to append all sorts of interesting third-party data to our client’s accounts, and holdings and balance information, to provide deeper and richer insights for the client.

Creating the front end was a very significant undertaking for us. All of our front-end web experience is homegrown. We are launching our iPad app next week. That’s all homegrown too, and we have a sophisticated portfolio management system in the back end — called MyVest — that is used to manage our clients’ money.

So it’s clearly a combination of homegrown and things that are off the shelf.

InvestmentNews: What would the advantage be for the adviser to be open about the fact that the client probably has relationships or accounts elsewhere, away from the adviser? What would the advantage be for the adviser to say: “If you want to do something on your own, do this — or go here” — to your service, for example. What’s the advantage for the adviser in overtly recommending it?

Mr. Foregger: We haven’t built any formal structure, but we have had a lot of inquiries from advisers to use our service and somehow work with Personal Capital, to refer some of their down-market leads or even existing clients into our service that just aren’t profitable or without a scalable business model. We are looking at ways to institutionalize that, but to date, we haven’t done it.

The core service, however, is free. And it is a great way for any financial services professional’s client to be able to look at exactly what’s going on holistically in their financial life. As of today, there is no formal business structure that we have built for advisers to refer business, but it’s something that we are strongly considering.

LOWER-AUM CLIENTS

InvestmentNews: Rob, many of the large brokerage firms, including [Bank of America] Merrill Lynch, don’t seem to be very interested in their lower-AUM clients. That might be a great source for you guys.

Mr. Foregger: If there’s anyone from Merrill Lynch in the audience that would like to talk to us, feel free to give me a call. But on a serious note, this is a real issue in the high-end wealth manager marketplace. For example, take the case of an adviser with a $5 million client and that client has a brother-in-law or mother-in-law interested in having the wealth manager handle their assets. Unfortunately, that great client’s relative has only $500,000 or $250,000 to invest,which is below the adviser’s minimum. That’s our sweet spot.

With our service, we provide a way for that wealth manager to know there’s going to a very strong home for that account. That’s why I think there will be some great opportunities for us that could be very beneficial for advisers having to tackle scaling issues.

InvestmentNews: It is also probably a good way to incorporate kids; the adult children and the teenage children of wealthy clients who probably are used to doing finance online. They can see the whole income and outlay on there, and the beginning of their individual retirement account, 401(k) plan. It is a useful tool to see everything.

Mr. Foregger: That’s correct. We’ve only been live for four, five months. But we have had a lot of requests for householding for just that purpose, which would allow a user to be able to add other household participants just to be able to see things in a holistic way, in different views. That’s something that we will be looking at pretty seriously over the coming months.

InvestmentNews: This question is for all of you. Is there any particular kind of demographic that you are seeing right now?

Is online advice something that attracts mainly younger investors, or are you seeing this run all across the gamut? And even in terms of wealth, how wealthy are these clients? Once they have reached a certain point, wouldn’t they want to sit across a desk from an adviser?

Mr. Porter: We are seeing the whole gamut, of course — the younger generation being drawn to the online advice — but a lot of older investors and a lot of the upper generation are comfortable with it. And given the fact that we are giving our advisers the ability to meet either in person or online, we can accommodate everything.

When it comes to the amount of wealth they have, we are seeing the same thing all the way — from somebody just getting started, younger professionals with just a few thousand dollars in their 401(k), all the way up to $1 million-plus.

InvestmentNews: Rob, what is your fee for assets under management?

Mr. Foregger: It starts at 95 basis points and goes down to 75 basis points. and that includes all the custodial fees. It’s quite competitive. Essentially, when you are at scale, it’s almost 40% less than the average equity fund. And you’re getting personalized portfolio management, which includes sort of tax optimization, personalization and your dedicated adviser.

InvestmentNews:: And Trent, what about Veritat?

Mr. Porter: Assets under management is optional, but investment management is available. It starts at 70 basis points and goes down from there, and each goal has an appropriate asset allocation based on time, horizon, risk tolerance and priority, rather than just an asset allocation for accounts based solely on their risk tolerance for a retirement goal.

InvestmentNews: And Frank, you don’t go on basis points, you go on cups of coffee. That is your measure of expense, right?

Mr. Troise: That’s about as complex as we get, correct.

InvestmentNews: Trent, we have a question for you from an attendee: Does the Veritat platform provide for account aggregation?

Mr. Porter: No, it does not. We just found that, with the kind of hiccups that we are encountering with account aggregation, it was easier to allow clients to enter in that data themselves and to deal with all the security measures that banks are putting in.

InvestmentNews: Frank, from the questions that have been coming in from attendees, there is still confusion and questions about how you are distributing leads. Are you distributing the same lead to several advisers or is each lead exclusive to one adviser?

Mr. Troise: What we are doing is we are putting the adviser in a position where they can literally draw a 50-mile radius around their office, they can geo-target. We have advisers coming to us saying, “I’m looking for folks north of $500,000 in assets, or married couples, both working, making $150,000 a year.” So again, what we want to do is different than a weak pay-per-click, pay-per-impression model. We want to be in a position where we say to the adviser: “Here is John Doe. Here is the information that he’s given us. He’s yours. Go.”

InvestmentNews: But if there were two advisers in that 50-mile radius and they both have the same criteria, would you distribute that lead to both of them if it met the criteria, or would you pick just one? And if you picked one, how would you do that?

Mr. Troise: The key here is there is a first-mover advantage, and I want to be very clear about that. Right now, there is a very high probability that any particular adviser isn’t within a 50-mile radius of the person requesting an adviser. I want to be clear, we’ve been out there marketing this only for a year, even though we’ve been doing this for three years.

So what we say to advisers is: “Look, you have the chance now to create that footprint today and own it. Do you want to be introducing this concept of free education planning, retirement planning, stress test, etc., to your CPA or do you want to wait a bit, and two weeks from now, your next-door neighbor or competitor, he’s probably going to do it, as well?”

So right now, we are seeing this first-mover phenomenon. And I think the problem of saturation will avail itself eventually. When that happens, we are going to have a very good problem in figuring out how to allocate those leads to folks.

InvestmentNews: But let’s just say we have three Merrill Lynch guys in the audience today, and they are all in the Scottsdale office, and they say: “Yes, this is a great idea, all three of us will sign up.” And they go after the same kind of clients. What would you do if all three of them signed up? How would you apportion the leads?

Mr.Troise: I say: “Guys, great. Let’s not deal with theory. Talk to us today, become a client of our firm, and let’s deal with the real problem.” The good news is, we’ve got 2,500 miles of territory between California and New York City, and the problem hasn’t come up yet.

InvestmentNews: Nothing where three people in the same city come up and say, “Give us leads?” Would it be first come, first served?

Mr. Troise: Well, right now, it’s first come, first served, and we are not doing anything yet in terms of exclusivity to territories or timing exclusivity. But again, keep in mind, in Manhattan, you could basically have a broker and adviser covering a two-block territory and be fine, relative to how much is in a high-rise. Conversely, you look at Los Angeles, with the dispersion demographically as to how people can be spread out. It’s different.

InvestmentNews: You had a partnership with a community bank — or a chain of community banks — in your neck of the woods in California. Are you guys in discussions with any other groups of community banks around the country? Is that another route of lead generation, as well?

Mr. Troise: Absolutely. What we are finding in terms of interesting anecdotal data points is that the majority of folks coming over, no surprise, are in cash, and then the other corollary to that is that they probably have two, three, four cash accounts open because they were all capping at their FDIC limits.

The banks approached us and asked if there would be a way for us to white-label or private-label our reports and our analysis, because they think the tools could enhance their cash acquisition ability and drive up deposits, as well.

We also have community banks with trust departments who’ve come to us and said that they not only want to monetize their cash deposits, but actually think they can convert those accounts into wealth management clients.

So again, that’s why I go back to this first-mover thing, where the community banks now are looking at all of the above — the banner ads on their websites, text links that their business development people are sending out and putting inserts in monthly statements regarding the offers we have.

I go back to that question about the team at Merrill. It’s inevitable that we’ll have a community bank in the territory or another broker-dealer or another RIA asking for the service, because again, the mathematical qualification of what we are doing is too compelling.

AVAILABILITY

InvestmentNews: Frank, is your service available to advisers at national brokerage firms or just to independents?

Mr. Troise: The reality is, the independent broker-dealers are much faster in terms of recognizing this and empowering their reps to do it.

At the same time, we are going through the business development and approval process that you would expect from an entity like Merrill Lynch to get this through. And I think that’s just a function of timing.

We have local reps who have become advocates and have been good about championing this through the chain of command. But independent B-Ds are looking at our press releases and seeing that pockets of folks who have 200, 300 and 500 reps are coming aboard the platform.

InvestmentNews: Granted, yours is a relatively new service. But have you been able to measure at all the percentage of leads that actually result in business for an adviser?

Mr. Troise: Yes. It’s interesting when an adviser is given a lead concerning a prospect who has $1 million in assets and willing to pay 100 basis points, or $10,000 a year, in fee income.

At that point, when they’re given the lead, the adviser becomes the worst salesperson — and I say that tongue-in-cheek, because I would do the same thing if I was in their chair. They’ll say the lead may be worth $10,000, but since they’re not going to close it, they’ll only pay a fraction of that.

So one of the things we’ve been studying over the past year is conversion ratios. At a minimum, fee-based planners are getting billable hours from their new clients, and we’re going to start publishing the conversion ratio data that we are seeing, because obviously, it will help us with pricing.

InvestmentNews: Could each of you mention something that advisers could take away from this? Rob, let’s start with you.

Mr. Foregger: I’ll wrap up by stating that it’s critical to automate the nonvalue, value-add functions within the advisory practice.

It’s critical that you are connecting using the modern technologies that are now available. Seeing the client’s data holistically is critical, as is using new and interesting partnership and marketing techniques to drive future acquisition. I think those are all key points.

InvestmentNews: Trent, what would you like advisers to know?

Mr. Porter: We really believe in the importance of the adviser relationship with clients, and we’ve built our company around that. We want to enable them to become as efficient as possible, leverage their time, automate anything possible and really focus on their core talents — serving clients.

InvestmentNews: And Frank, what about you?

Mr. Troise: We are in a low-yield, low-return environment in which it’s very difficult to differentiate investment products.

I think folks now realize it’s coming down to the service offering. And we believe that our co-speakers here are adding significant value in terms of efficiency and economics.

And at the same time, advisers need to be thinking about what they can do differently on the client acquisition side.

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