By Laura Urmoneit

(November 7 – 16:05 ET) – Advisors who participate in the Dalbar Rating Program receive in-depth feedback from clients and a comprehensive warts-and-all look at their practice.

This year, 23 advisors have earned the right to display the Dalbar seal to clients and prospects.

“Individual advisors volunteer to open up their client base to us. The customers are asked to rate their advisors on a four point scale,” says Manny Da Silva, director of Toronto-based Dalbar Inc.

Initially benchmarks are established by surveying close to 300 independent Canadian investors about four aspects of their relationship to their advisors: trust; satisfaction; performance and quality of advice. The same survey is sent out to the volunteer advisor’s own client base.

Clients are asked to give a rating to questions like ‘I act on recommendations made by my advisor’, ‘I intend to use my financial planner next year,’ and ‘willingness to recommend advisor’.

In order to qualify for the program participants must have worked full-time as an advisor for at least five years, have a clean regulatory record, and pay a fee of $850.

“Advisors do this because they want to do a temperature check. It’s a good way to gauge how they’re performing and receive feedback. As well it has marketing appeal, they use the seal to establish trust with a prospect,” says Da Silva. He adds that one advisor found out through the program that a significant portion of his clients were not using him for insurance, with that information the advisor can work to improve that.

“We wanted to know what our clients were thinking,” says Charles Brophy at Ottawa-based Brophy Financial Planning, who has achieved the seal for the past two years. “Certainly we’ll [volunteer] again next year because we’ve noticed we’ve improved in different areas and flat-lined in others,” he says.

“I did it because it’s one way of judging what my clients really think of me. I’ve set myself high standards and I want to know if I’m living up to them,” says another Dalbar seal recipient, Akeela Davis, at British Columbia-based Berkshire Investment Group Inc.

In total, thirty-five advisors volunteered for the program. Those that did not make the final cut failed to surpass the benchmark in at least one category of the survey. The program is in its second year in Canada and its fourth in the United States. For a list of this year’s winners, visit www.dalbar.com.