Financial service providers, also called financial planners or advisors, juggle an overwhelming number of tasks every day. Besides assisting individuals, families, and organizations in making investment decisions, they also have to run finance-related business functions in a smooth and coordinated way. The core business processes in financial services are quite similar to other sales-oriented businesses. Let’s look more deeply at the core process in financial services and what it takes to handle the diverse finance processes.

Research

Research is a vital component of every profession. It’s even more important for financial service providers because they have to be well-versed in the features, advantages, and limitations of the products available to their clients. For assisting clients in purchasing products such as life insurance, annuities, money market funds, equity-based mutual funds, college savings plans, and other financial instruments, financial planners must keep abreast of new products and developments in the industry.

Besides the technical aspects of financial planning, they also have to research subjects such as behavioral economics, psychology, and the impact of an aging society to gain a deeper understanding of financial planning.

Prospecting

Prospecting is the main challenge faced by financial advisors. The most successful financial advisors are usually the ones who are good at prospecting.

Financial planners majorly rely on word-of-mouth referrals from existing clients to get leads. Besides that, they have to spend time “cold calling” organizations and individuals and even make in-person solicitations to large businesses.

Some of the other methods of prospecting used by them include attending trade conferences, speaking at seminars, hosting webinars, and placing advertisements in publications.

Customer Service

Due to the nature of their line of work, customer trust and satisfaction are extremely important for financial planners. They have to gain a deeper understanding of the client’s financial situation, risk tolerance, and investment goals to advise them on the right solution.

Using a mix of formal assessment tools and personal conversations, they create a client-specific profile that can be altered over time. Their customer service role extends beyond the initial meeting and sales process. To provide satisfactory customer service to their clients they:

• Educate clients on their options of investing through highly digestible content.
• Schedule check-in points throughout the year.
• Patiently listen to their client’s goals and concerns without trying to push their own plan or agenda.
• Regularly reach out to the clients to share updates.

Account Maintenance

Financial advisors often handle all of the transactions between their clients and financial institutions.

The account maintenance activities include:

• Filling out and submitting applications for financial products.
• Forwarding clients’ initial cash deposits or rollover funds.
• Personally looking after the transactions when clients wish to withdraw from their accounts or make deposits.
• Getting in touch with financial institutions to obtain periodic reports on clients’ accounts.
• Facilitate any communication between clients and the financial institutions.

Final Words

Financial advisors have a moral responsibility to act in their client’s best interests. For this purpose, they follow the above processes that hold the key to customer satisfaction and are instrumental in financial planning.