Must-Have Financial Advisor Skills to Achieve Success
Financial advising firms help clients manage their finances and create plans tailored to each client’s needs and financial goals, covering services such as wealth management, estate planning, and retirement planning.
While it’s not a requirement to get certified, designations to show off your expertise — such as Certified Financial Planner (CFP), Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), or Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC) — will give a major boost to your credibility in front of recruiters or clients.
Furthermore, due to the sensitive nature of your work, you need certain licenses to fully perform your duties as an advisor, giving investment advice and suggesting insurance policies.
A bachelor’s degree, on the other hand, is a different story. Most, if not all, entry-level financial advisor job opportunities require you to have a degree. And a master’s degree can be an added bonus to your resume.
On top of that, if you want to be successful in the financial industry, you need a wide variety of skills, ranging from hard skills, such as risk management and analytical skills, to soft skills involving problem-solving, personal management, and interpersonal skills. These skills aren’t always listed in the job description, but they can make your job easier.
In this article, we’ll discuss nine important skills to have for a successful career in financial planning.
9 Financial Advisor Skills for Success
While this isn’t an exhaustive list, having these skills will position you as one of the best financial advisors around. Here are the nine skills you need to sharpen to become successful as a financial services provider.
1. Attention to Detail
Developing an eye for detail allows personal financial advisors to gain market insight and spot market trends. Both are necessary in order to provide good financial strategies and recommendations.
Having good attention to detail and leaving no stones unturned also helps eliminate big mistakes and minimize small ones, which can turn out to be very costly depending on the type of client you serve.
Paying attention to detail also helps when working with figures and maintaining financial records. It’s important to keep accurate, up-to-date records to ensure that your business runs smoothly.
2. Outstanding Communication
Grasping basic communication skills like networking and effective email and telephone etiquette is the bare minimum to start in the industry. In order to keep your business thriving, you need to be able to convert potential clients and retain them. While the current communication skills you have right now might be enough to guide clients with clarity, selling your expertise is another matter.
Since financial planners work one-on-one with their clients, it's necessary to be someone easy to talk with. It will lessen the friction you may encounter when broaching difficult or sensitive subjects with your clients — such as their financial struggles and things that keep them up at night.
It's important to be able to relate to people and find common ground to help your clients feel more comfortable sharing their financial concerns.
Having exceptional communication skills is also necessary to explain technical financial jargon and concepts in a simpler, clearer way to your clients. Using language that is easy to understand when delivering your advice will help clients understand what you're talking about and thus help them make an informed decision.
3. Market Research Capabilities
In order to provide good advice and recommendations to your clients as a financial advisor, an in-depth understanding of the market is important. You’ll need to do extensive investigation and market research. Not only to stay on top of things — such as new emerging products and current trends — but also to find investments that fit your client's goals and values.
That is why it's important to develop strong research capabilities, such as gathering, analyzing, and processing data efficiently.
4. Stress Management
Finance is one of the most critical parts of someone's life. There's no doubt that managing other people's finances is far from easy.
Financial planners take their client's financial portfolios and help them with decisions that will end up impacting the client's financial situation, for better or worse. While not all decisions have a high impact, there's always an underlying anxiety of financial disaster that can be difficult for clients.
On top of all that, financial advisors still need to maintain their business — getting new clients via sales and marketing — as well as make time for research and self-improvement to better themselves.
This can be a devastating combination. It's necessary to practice proper stress management to avoid burnout.
5. Trustworthiness
Financial matters are a very sensitive part of one's life. It's not strange that people can't freely trust others to manage their finances.
While trust is an abstract concept, having certifications, licenses, and a track record to back up your claims goes a long way to building your credibility as a professional.
In addition, saying what you mean and meaning what you say, being personable, reliable, and welcoming can help advisors win clients' trust.
Building trust with clients will make it easier for them to communicate their needs and confide their concerns. Both are necessary to gain deeper insight into a client's financial profile, which will help advisors provide relevant advice and strategies that move the needle for their clients.
With this in mind, it's easy to see why trustworthy financial advisors have a better chance to grow their business and keep their clients longer.
6. Exceptional Organization
Organizational skills are a core competency of a professional. Having good organizational skills helps in various ways.
The most obvious comes in the ability to organize information, be it during the research process or when presenting financial reports to clients. Be exceptional at organizing your thoughts so clients can understand what you say, whether you convey it through reports, Excel sheets, or a visual map.
Organizational skills also speak to your self-management capabilities. When a financial planner is organized, they can allocate their time better too. This ensures that they can serve their clients well. With more satisfied clients, financial advisors will find it easier to grow their client base, as well as their income.
7. Risk Management
Financial advisors help clients reach their goals by advising them based on their current financial situation and future goals.
However, before delivering advice, a financial advisor must analyze and anticipate challenges that may occur on the way to these goals.
This is called risk assessment and management. Risks can be market fluctuations, which may affect investment success, or lack of job security, which may increase financial stress and even limit future income for the client.
Good risk assessment skills and staying up-to-date with the market helps advisors to give accurate and reliable advice befitting their clients' portfolio. Likewise, risk management, such as anticipating risks and averting them before they stunt the client's investment growth, is equally important.
8. Continuous Learning
The industry is always changing, and financial advisors should strive for continuous learning.
There's always a hot new thing in the industry — be it a new financial product, a new business model, or even a new science in financial advisory (for example, behavioral finance). To stay relevant in this field, financial advisors must stay on top of things, especially with the constantly shifting landscape.
It might be difficult to expend the effort to learn constantly but frame it as investing in yourself.
Developing a huge appetite for new knowledge and an attitude of lifelong learning helps immensely to stay on top of things.
9. Empathy
When clients seek financial guidance for the first time or during a crisis — for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic — they often reach out because they are facing a financial problem. That's why it's also important for advisors to be able to counsel their clients.
In some cases, it's more important to counsel and reassure clients than to give financial advice.
In order to do that, financial advisors need to be able to empathize with their clients. Developing a sense of empathy and having high emotional intelligence also helps businesses to flourish in various ways.
On top of creating meaningful advisor-client connections, it also can help advisors gain insight into the emotions behind a client's financial decision, as well as help them maintain a strong client base and nurture their network.
Showcase Your Skills with Asset-Map
As a financial advisor, you need a variety of soft and hard skills to manage your practice and clients.
You can get hard skills through degrees and certifications. However, the other skills can only be attained through work experience. Having a mentor to guide you through your career will also quicken the process. While the skills we mentioned are hard to get, they’re necessary so you can grow your career and last for a long time as an advisor.
Asset-Map serves as a tool to focus the discussion during client meetings. Our visual platform helps you direct your meetings to a more productive discussion about what clients need to know.
With less focus on technical details, you’ll be able to have productive conversations about how your clients can move forward. This shift helps you focus on showing clients the skills you’ve accumulated and your value as a financial advisor.
See how you can have more productive client meetings and show off your skills with Asset-Map.