Sometimes, less is more – and that’s the approach Investment Executive (IE) took in our 2015 Brokerage Report Card.
As the brokerage industry has evolved from a transaction-based business to one focused on wealth management, the Report Card survey has been expanded to get investment advisors’ perspectives on their firms’ growing services and resources. Yet, asking so many questions made the survey a little unwieldy for participants and researchers alike. As a result, the Report Card survey was pared down this year.
In 2014, IE asked advisors to rate their firms in 38 categories, including the “overall rating.” To streamline the survey process, IE research journalists Joy Blenman, Kevin Philipupillai, Kelsey Rolfe and Anne-Marie Vettorel asked 466 financial advisors at 12 brokerages to rate their firms in 34 categories (including the overall rating) this year.
The three categories dropped in this year’s survey were: “firm’s consumer advertising”; “support for overall wealth-management process”; and the “firm’s approach to diversity and inclusion.”
As well, a category question was reworded. In 2014, advisors were asked to rate their firm’s “support for helping clients plan for post-retirement income.” This year, that question was reworded as “support for constructing a deaccumulation strategy for retired clients.” Originally, the intent was for the questions to mean the same thing and to compare the ratings year-over-year. However, the new wording confused advisors; the results were so different from 2014 that we treated this category as being new.
IE also added a supplementary question that asked advisors to rate how dramatically they anticipate the second phase of the client relationship model (CRM2) will impact their business on a scale of one to five, with one representing “not at all” and five representing “completely.” (See story on page 1 of this issue of IE.)
Ratings for all of the categories in the main ratings table (see page C4) were tabulated after participating advisors provided two responses to each category – one for their firm’s performance and another to specify the importance of that category to the advisor’s business.
Advisors were asked to rate each category on a scale of zero to 10, with zero meaning “poor” or “unimportant” and 10 meaning “excellent” or “critically important.”
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