Enjoy the current installment of “weekend reading for financial planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with an interesting new advisor survey on the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, which finds that despite the claims of Wall Street lobbying firms that “small investors” will be abandoned if the fiduciary rule fully takes effect, only 3% of financial advisors themselves actually agree with the statement that they’ll stop providing advice on qualified retirement accounts in a fiduciary world!
From there, we have a number of articles on the topic of health insurance and health care planning this week, including a look at the rise of “direct primary care” providers who simply charge an ongoing monthly fee (and accept no insurance) for a primary physician with easier access and shorter wait times for an appointment, the rise of “concierge medicine” and private doctors that work directly to provide holistic medical advice for a wealthy family, a new platform for advisors called “HealthStyles.net” that can be provided to clients to help them get more educated on health care issues, and another new software solution called “Whealthcare” for advisors who want to get even more involved in supporting and better analyzing the intersection of a client’s financial planning and health care needs (a substantial opportunity to add value as investment management becomes commoditized).
We also have several investment-related articles, including a look at the increasingly controversial practice of order routing rebates from market exchanges to broker-dealers, a potential pilot program from the SEC to shift away from the current “maker-taker” structure of setting markets, the opportunity (and underutilization) of securities-based lending revenue to offset most or all of the expense ratio of ETFs, and the prospective rise of performance-based fees in mutual funds as a way for fund managers to differentiate their pricing and better align their compensation with the interests of their mutual fund shareholders (though it remains to be seen whether investment managers will actually be willing to adopt the practice!).
We wrap up with three articles focused on the evolving role of the financial advisor itself: the first reviews a recent Boston Consulting Group study that suggests as technology continues to expedite the administrative tasks of financial advisors, that we’ll be increasingly forced to deliver more sophisticated advice, and need more in-depth formal education to substantial our value; the second is a look at the rise of financial coaching, and the emergence of training programs for those who want to be financial coaches and financial therapists (and whether financial planners should be engaging in such training programs themselves); and the last is a look at how the generational shift in financial planners themselves, from the “founding” Baby Boomer generation of advisors to the Millennials, is creating a significant shift in the vision of what it means to be a financial planner in the first place, and is driving a growing number of young financial planners to strike out on their own to create new firms that disrupt the incumbents… exactly as the prior generation of Baby Boomer financial planners did 20-30 years ago!
Enjoy the “light” reading!
source https://www.kitces.com/blog/weekend-reading-for-financial-planners-aug-26-27/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=weekend-reading-for-financial-planners-aug-26-27
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