Client Experience

Taking a comprehensive approach to achieving all your financial dreams may require a wealth management approach. This means more than just taking care of your investments. It also means addressing your advanced planning needs, including wealth enhancement, wealth transfer, wealth protection and wealth legacy.

Such a wide range of financial needs requires a wide range of financial expertise. Because no one person can be an expert in all these subjects, the best wealth managers work with networks of financial professionals with deep experience and knowledge in specific areas.

Effective wealth managers, then, are experienced at relationship management—first building relationships with their clients in order to fully understand their unique needs and challenges and then coordinating the efforts of their professional teams in order to meet those needs and challenges. Wealth managers must also work with their clients’ other consultants—such as attorneys and accountants— in order to ensure optimal outcomes.

Many in the financial services industry today call themselves wealth managers but may offer little more than investment management. How then will you know whether you are dealing with a true wealth manager?

First, the consultant should offer a full range of financial services, including the four areas of advanced planning that we mentioned above. As we’ve said, the wealth manager should be backed up by a network of experts to provide these services.

Second, the wealth manager should work with you on a consultative basis. This allows the wealth manager to uncover your true financial needs and goals, to craft a long-range wealth management plan that is designed to help meet those needs and goals, and to build an ongoing relationship with you that ensures that your needs continue to be met as they change over time.

This consultative process usually unfolds over a series of meetings:

• At the discovery meeting, the wealth manager determines your current financial situation, where you want to go and the obstacles you face in achieving what is important to you.
• At the preliminary investment plan meeting, the wealth manager, using the information he or she gathered at your first meeting, presents a complete diagnostic of your current financial situation and a plan for achieving your investment-related goals.
• At the investment plan implementation meeting, assuming that the wealth manager can truly add value, both you and the wealth manager decide to work together. You now officially become a client.
• At the initial progress meeting, the wealth manager helps you to organize your new account paperwork and answers any questions that may have arisen.
• At regular progress meetings, which are typically held quarterly, the wealth manager reports to you on the progress you’re making toward achieving your goals and checks in with you on any important changes in your life that might call for an adjustment to your investment plan. In addition, at the first regular progress meeting, the wealth manager presents to you a wealth management plan—a comprehensive blueprint for addressing your advanced planning needs that has been developed in coordination with the wealth manager’s network of experts. At subsequent progress meetings, you and the wealth manager decide how to proceed on specific elements of the wealth management plan. In this way, over time, every aspect of your complete financial picture is effectively managed.