Advisers want more-understanding wholesalers

Financial advisers, already overwhelmed with frazzled clients, want more understanding from their wholesalers, said panelists at the NAVA Inc. marketing conference this week. “Wholesalers need to know us and work with us the way we work with clients,” Craig Bernard, president of the Advantage Financial/Madison (Conn.) Investment Center, said during the panel discussion “Financial Adviser Perspectives on the Current Climate.” Advisers at the event said that the recent market turmoil — the worst that some have seen in decades — has brought out the worst in some of their clients. Panelist Kelly Campbell, principal of Campbell Wealth Management in Fairfax, Va., noted that one of his investors was rattled enough to call with a request that the adviser liquidate a managed account and a real estate investment trust but to retain a variable annuity with guarantees, which had performed the worst of all three investments. Activity at the panelists’ firms has been at a fever pitch, as some are working longer hours and increasing client communications through town-hall-style meetings, phone calls and e-mails. They said they would like wholesalers to give them the same attention that they pay to their clients. Product pitches and e-mail blasts from wholesalers who are clueless about advisers’ firms go by the wayside. Instead, advisers want to hear plans that they can readily implement at their practices to help them at a time when asset levels have eroded. Even though clients are a priority, the advisers are business owners and employers first, they said. Advisers are also searching for tips from wholesalers: What have they been hearing from advisers at the firms that have done well? “If the wholesaler is going to dozens of successful offices, I want them to share that with our staff,” Mr. Bernard said. Panelist Joan Valenti, a Farmington, Conn.-based adviser with LPL Financial of Boston, whose office manages $125 million, agrees. “We don’t have time to open emails from wholesalers,” she said. “You have no idea how much time it takes to research everything we do so we know the answer before we get the calls from clients. There isn’t enough time to spend time with the wholesalers.”