3 Myths About Wealth Managers: Insights for Insurance Professionals

Insurance professionals build their businesses by helping clients protect their financial well-being from catastrophe.

If you are such a professional, it’s only natural for you to consider expanding into wealth management to help your clients pursue financial wellness as well. You don’t need to look far for reasons to do so; in fact, we captured several in a previous blog post.

Even so, it’s not uncommon for many of the insurance professionals that we’ve consulted with at AssetMark to be hesitant about expanding into financial advisory because of three pervasive myths.

Myth #1 – “My clients probably already have an investment advisor.”

Few insurance or investment professionals enjoy prospecting for clients, and many view it as a necessary evil. However, we’ve observed that a lot of insurance professionals already have robust books of current clients they can approach.

According to the CFP Board, only 24% of adults receive retirement-saving advice from a financial professional.[1] Given that, it’s highly likely a significant portion of your insurance clientele may be going it alone when it comes to saving for retirement or other financial goals.

If they are trying to manage their finances on their own but are open to (or even actively seeking) professional guidance, successfully expanding into wealth management could be as simple as approaching them with a better solution to pursue their goals.

Even those clients who previously were comfortable managing their own investments may now be open to professional guidance, given the pandemic and heightened market volatility we’ve recently witnessed. According to Cerulli, data shows investors are more likely to seek professional advice during periods of volatility.[2]

Your position of trust as a client’s insurance professional may uniquely qualify you to offer them the investing support they are seeking or need.

Myth #2 – “To be a good financial advisor, I will have to know how to research investments and construct portfolios.”

You are not mistaken if you believe helping a client invest in a well-researched, well-constructed portfolio aligned with their objectives and risk tolerance is critical to an investment advisor’s value proposition.

Of course, it’s also true that you need to know enough about investing to successfully sit for licensing exams, but beyond that, many insurance professionals we speak with assume they will need to have a complete financial analysis toolkit in order to construct diversified portfolios and identify and monitor the underlying investments, which is not necessarily the case.

While those activities can certainly be conducted by one individual, it is very common in today’s investment industry for those duties to be performed by teams of investment specialists, with some conducting ongoing investment research and others constructing and managing portfolios over time.

If you want to build on your clients’ trust and help them pursue financial wellness by advising them on their investments, you don’t need to be an expert in investment research, asset allocation, or portfolio construction, you just need the right team to provide those important functions for you.

Myth #3 – “I need to be comfortable talking about investments and the markets with my clients.”

Similarly, many insurance professionals shy away from the idea of having to talk about investments and the markets with their clients when the inevitable downturn happens. Moreover, the idea of quarterly updates on investments can seem time-intensive and onerous.

Ongoing communication with investment clients is an important part of retaining their confidence in you—their advisor—as well as their investment approach and its potential success. Like creating the actual portfolio, this is something that investment professionals who work with AssetMark have discovered can be accomplished through the support of a dedicated team of investment specialists.

The AssetMark team has worked directly with many insurance professionals to help them take their first steps along the journey to offering more comprehensive wealth management services. When you’ve supported this transition as much as we have, you learn a few lessons along the way. We’ve gathered these lessons for you in our guide, Beyond Insurance: Adding Wealth Management to Your Service Offering. If you’re thinking about offering financing advising services at your insurance business, we highly recommend this valuable resource.

 Overcome these myths by helping your clients realize the benefits of personalized guidance from a trusted advisor with an online investing and planning experience.

As stated earlier, you don’t have to be able to do it all, you just need to align yourself with the right team who can provide you with the types of expertise and support you need when you need it. What you’re seeking is a versatile multi-functional financial analysis and investment platform that delivers the solutions to the myths we dispelled above.

If you’re an insurance professional who is new to investment advisory, you should consider a platform that can help you at every step of your journey, including:

• Outreach to current clients and prospects – You want an easy-to-set-up online discovery process for your prospects and clients that helps get them started down the path to investment success even before your initial meeting.
• Aligning client objectives and risk tolerance with well-diversified portfolios – You need technology that helps you understand your prospects’ and clients’ objectives and risk tolerances so you can guide them to the investment strategies that are right for them.
• Providing transparency into their account and the markets – You require 24/7 access to your clients’ accounts via an online dashboard which allows both you and the clients to monitor investments in real-time. You want support so you can regularly provide ongoing insights about the markets, your clients’ investments, and more.

If you’re ready to incorporate investment advisory into your practice, AssetMark WealthBuilder^SM can help get your clients and prospects on track and help them stay on track.

When asked why he made the transition to investment advisory services, an insurance professional we’ve worked with for some time said “Clients are looking for education, knowledge, and guidance. Wealth management helps grow the assets that insurance protects. Adding investment advisory services was a logical next step to me.”

If you’re thinking about adding wealth management capabilities to your services, AssetMark WealthBuilder makes good sense. Its ease of use and multiple functions—including prospecting capabilities, goal tracking, and professionally managed portfolios, to name a few— can solve many of your perceived challenges while also offering your clients real-time information and peace of mind, making it an ideal way for insurance professionals to “test the waters” of wealth management.

Access the Expertise of AssetMark

Ready to learn more about WealthBuilder? Get in touch with us. Our experts are standing by to walk you through the details of your transition and the many benefits that AssetMark WealthBuilder can bring to your practice.

[1] Source: Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc. April 2019. CFP Board Retirement Presentation. https://www.cfp.net/-/media/images/cfp-board/cfp-board-images/reports-and-publications/cfp-board-morning-consult-retirementpreparednesssurvey-2019.pdf?la=en&hash=ECC8C62E12723B392647015C2FB76908

 [2] Source: Cerulli. The Cerulli Report: U.S. High-Net-Worth and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Markets 2020 Implications of Wealth Concentration