How to Treat Financial Planning as a Virtual Profession
The modern client experience revolves around digital experiences in every area of life.
We don’t hail taxis by hand anymore, we schedule an Uber from our smartphone.
We don’t visit Blockbusters on a Friday night, we sit down on the couch and launch Netflix.
We don’t even visit doctors many times now—instead, we pull up a virtual meeting with a remote physician for non-serious illnesses.
After all, who wants to get out of bed and drive to the clinic when they’re sick?
Advisory firms need to be paying attention to digitization throughout industries to understand the expectations that investors are bringing with them into financial services.
Financial planning is positioned to become the next virtual profession, but you need to have the right tools in place to make it an easy transition.
The Visual Profession
The financial planning profession can easily transform itself into a virtual profession because it is already such a visual one.
When creating and reviewing a financial plan with a client, the best way to discuss their assets and organize their financial life is not by looking at a list of account values loaded into a spreadsheet.
Rather, the best way to review plans with clients today is visually. Goals aren’t defined by current account values so much as they are defined by the progress toward a goal.
As a result, planning with clients usually takes a look at a meter that fills up to visually represent progress toward a goal, or a Monte Carlo meter that puts probability of success on a dial.
The numbers are still part of the equation, but the simple visual illustration is much more impactful and resonates more quickly with the average consumer.
The reason for this is that people are visual learners. And the great part is that you can incorporate visuals like these in your meetings if you’re physically present, or half a world away.
The heavy reliance on visuals makes it simple to translate financial plans into the virtual world. If you have a webcam and screen-sharing software, you’re essentially ready to loosen your ties to a physical office.
The Ways We Work
Even if you discount the digitization of other service-based industries, you can’t discount the reality that more people are working remotely than ever before.
Globally, 70% of workers spend at least one remote day a week away from the office and the number of full-time remote workers in the United States rose more than 10% from 2012 to 2016.
As remote workers increase, their expectation to conduct work remotely will increase along with it.
And if you think about the ways you can hold a meeting, two out of three are remote. The odds are already in your favor to create a virtual process.
Web meeting with camera or screen-sharing
Over the phone, with visual aids sent separately
In-person meeting
But even if you do move toward scheduling more of your meetings to happen remotely, you still need the right tools to make the client experience seamless.
Finding the Right Tools for Virtual Financial Planning
Interactive visual tools from Asset-Map make planning collaborative between you and your clients.
One of the best features you can take advantage of during virtual meetings with clients is the ability to share an Asset-Map, so both of you can mark it up in real-time together.
It’s an even better experience than an in-person meeting because you aren’t passing a sheet of paper back and forth or maneuvering around each other to mark it up at the same time.
Through a screen share, you can update and add to their Target-Maps, and it updates immediately for in-the-moment sharing and adjusting of plans.
In tandem with a comprehensive financial planning tool you may be using, it’s a powerful experience. (See: Our integration with MoneyGuidePro makes it simple to create an Asset-Map from a financial plan.)
With the hectic travel schedules of professionals today, plus the desire to work remotely, turning your planning practice into a true virtual profession gives you the ability to work with clients in whatever way they want.
It puts the client first, and it gives you the opportunity to create a more flexible business for your desired lifestyle as well.
Provide your clients with clarity from anywhere. Click here to get a demo of Asset-Map to see how we make it possible.