INVESTIRE | May 2024
The figure of the financial advisor has a gift that is superior to many other professions, namely the ability to anticipate changes by riding them and not undergoing them.
This ability derives from the very essence of the financial advisor’s work, thanks to personal and daily contact with his clients, he is able to grasp market changes starting from daily empirical practice.
Many other professions are becoming anachronistic and losing prominence precisely because they are self-referential and detached from everyday reality, focused as they are more on grammar than on practice.
Among the many changes that financial advisors are facing with a great sense of reality and pragmatism is the growing predisposition to consider their work more and more as a team job and less and less as a free agent activity.
If it is true that the financial advisor’s motivation continues to be fuelled by strong self-esteem, it is equally clear that today more than in the past this needs to be increasingly fuelled by the support and recognition of colleagues.
The winning figure of the free-roaming financial advisor, very popular in the nineties, has given way to that of a leader capable of making use of the support of other colleagues in his bank.
The predisposition to work in a team has grown by 50% in five years, going from the average of 17% in 2018 to that of 34% in 2023.
The even more interesting fact is that senior financial advisors with a portfolio double the average are more likely to work in a team (42%).
They see the team as a support for their business, thanks to the addition of young consultants and assistants but also of specialists on specific topics such as: taxation and fiduciary services, asset protection and estate and succession planning, extraordinary finance operations linked to company shares of business customers.
Secondly, it is noted that women are also on average more inclined to work in teams than their male colleagues (40% vs. 33%), seeing teamwork as an effective support capable of capitalizing on different skills and finding solutions collegially rather than individually.
Even younger financial advisors are decidedly more oriented towards teamwork (45% vs. 34%) as they are aware that working alongside more senior colleagues with different skills is a fundamental prerequisite for their professional growth.
In a market that sees an ever-increasing concentration of portfolios and a growing role of senior consultants, it is extraordinarily nice to see that even women and young consultants agree on the need to team up.
The financial consultancy market has conquered a segment of customers (private families and entrepreneurs) with increasingly articulated and complex life and growth projects that require different skills and unique direction.
More than in the past, when the going gets tougher the individual professional needs a team to support him.
As in nature, therefore, the team increasingly takes on a central role in generating new professionals and regenerating the more senior ones.
And the fact that the importance of the team and the team is recognized especially by senior consultants, women and young people, lays the foundation for a bright future.
Nicola Ronchetti