Perspectives on an intergenerational wealth and planning proposition. Does one size fit all?

Experts: Stephen Greenfield and Blair Anderson, Dimensional fund advisors

Facilitator: Martyn Laverick, Managing Director, Phase 2 Consulting 

State of play

This presentation was based around at the 2019 adviser benchmark study and it looked at how people engaged with their clients. Questions were asked of the attendees around how they segmented their client bases and did they use different marketing approaches for different types of clients. On top of this attendees were asked how did Covid affect the way they communicate with clients.

It was clear from the responses that the majority of IFAs do not have a sophisticated form of client segmentation and do not communicate with clients differently based upon age or generation. At the moment it feels like a one size fits all approach is that the most common method utilised by IFA firms.

They was no firm there that felt they should communicate differently with women compared to men and reflecting on their client bases they felt they had a fairly equal number of male and female clients. In addition dealing with generation X and Y most firms appeared not to be that interested in looking to launch services for these groups.

However many firms felt their engagement with new technology had increased during Covid and more firms were utilising medium such as zoom or teams to engage with clients. Thhis had required some to learn quickly about this type of technology.

Given the input from the attendees you could take the they are not that interested in launching new services outside of their core client market because I felt they were attracting sufficient clients that fitted their current client profile and could see no immediate economic benefit of doing so.

The majority of clients of the attendees were clients with investable assets and hence had charging structure that were based around assets. There was a range of charging structure for these clients but the differences were more around the amounts rather than the types of fees i.e. fixed fees, % based etc. Only one firm had a proposition aimed the income wealthy cash/ poor client. This proposition was based around Cash Flow planning and general financial planning and has aimed at high earners. The fee for this type of service started at £5,000 per annum.

Conclusions

In summary firms did not currently see the need to have multiple service propositions aimed at different market segments and felt that the proposition they offered were sufficiently wide to be able to cater for the clients they were looking for. This also fed into pricing structures where firms likewise felt that they did not currently need to alter their pricing model or how they charge as they felt it was clear for clients to understand and delivered what it needed to for the business and clients.