together so they’re getting maximum
efficiency,” says Romine.
Use your broker-dealer to enhance
your client meetings. “There’s a
whole variety of things broker-dealers
can do,” says Cogan. “These include
holding conference calls on the market and with advisors on how to comment on the market, producing letters
that the advisors can send to their
clients either through email or snail
mail, [and] doing meetings for advisor
clients with their clients so that other
people can talk about what’s going
on.” Cogan says his company even
helps advisors formulate positioning
strategies and teaches them how to
handle increasingly painful annual
reviews with their clients.
MANY ADVISORS OFTEN FAIL TO TAKE
FULL ADVANTAGE OF THEIR
BROKER-DEALERS’ TECHNOLOGY.
compliance department may become
even more important. Get more from
that relationship by asking more questions and get your broker-dealer to
review more aspects of your business.
Compliance philosophies are evolving, too, which means that broker-dealers may be offering new and related products and programs or focusing
their attention on specific areas of the
advisor’s business. Capital Analysts, for
example, has introduced the Annuity
Intelligence program, which allows
advisors to conduct a documented
comparison of complicated
products and then automate much of the
paperwork for a
1035 exchange.
And Skloff reports
that his broker-dealer has
increased its efforts to make sure he’s got
the best written disclosure possible, most
recently by making suggestions about
how to optimize the disclosure language
on his website. “I feel as if I can call
my broker-dealer with questions about
compliance and regulations and have a
healthy, open conversation,” says Skloff.
Strengthen your relationship with
the compliance department. Most
of the advisors and broker-dealers
interviewed for this article expect
increased oversight in the
near future, which
means that your
relationship with
the folks in the
Keep an eye on your broker-dealer’s
financial stability. These days, knowing
whether your broker-dealer is financially
stable or not is paramount, and understanding the nuances of that stability
goes beyond simply reviewing FINRA
filings. It means understanding how your
broker-dealer will make up lost revenue
if it’s making a big change in product
offerings, looking at the health of the
broker-dealer’s parent, understanding the
broker-dealer’s potential liabilities, and
doing everything you can to “see around
the proverbial corner.”
Time to make a move?
If after you have done everything to
maximize your broker-dealer relationship you are still not satisfied with the
services you are receiving, it may be
time to start looking elsewhere. But remember that switching broker-dealers
isn’t easy. In fact, you need to carefully
consider at least three things before
you make a move:
SKLOFF REPORTS THAT HIS BROKER-DEALER HAS
INCREASED EFFORTS TO MAKE SURE HE’S
GOT THE BEST WRITTEN DISCLOSURE POSSIBLE.
Talk to your clients. “It’s going to be
very difficult for brokers to go through
this process because they’re worried about
their own production, they’re worried
about their relationships with their clients, they’re worried about how they can
lay another change on them when their
expectations may not have been met in
terms of what their portfolio was going
to do,” says Michael Stalker, CFA, and
