recently shared research from Franklin Templeton that reveals that individual investors are not aware of the bull run that has been going on in the equity markets for the past forty-three months. Since the in March 2009, stocks have earned a cumulative return greater than 100%. Apparently, investors have failed to notice and participate in this impressive stock comeback because they are distracted by prevalent negative economic news that the media and politicians constantly remind them of, including slow growth, high unemployment, and the weak housing market. Moreover, these investors just cannot overcome their bad memories of the beating they took in 2008 in which the S&P 500 declined by almost 40%. Franklin Templeton’s survey of 1,000 individual investors returned the following results concerning the current state of investor psychology:
- 66% asserted the S&P 500 was down in 2009 (it actually gained 26.5% that year).
- 48% thought the S&P 500 was down in 2010 (it actually gained 15.1% that year).
- 53% believed that the S&P 500 was down in 2011 (it actually gained 2.1% that year).
Based on these responses, it is no surprise that close to $170 billion has been withdrawn from equity mutual funds over the past three years. Instead, these investors are choosing to park their money in cash equivalent funds and money market funds, which are earning historically low interest rates that are not even keeping up with inflation. Once again, investors are missing out as the S&P 500 is up almost 18% year-to-date as of 9/21/12 per Morningstar. Of course, the traditionally volatile month of October is right around the corner and there are still a few months left in the year in which anything can happen. Nevertheless, clients will continue to miss out on solid equity returns should they remain so risk-averse and conservative.
In many cases, investors may be out-of-touch and slightly oblivious to market conditions because they are not receiving adequate attention and updates from their financial advisors. After working with larger Broker/Dealers and RIAs, Customer Effective has found that the advisors who operate more efficiently are the ones that have better insight into the last time they spoke with a client, prepared a financial plan for the client, or had an actual face to face portfolio review. By having these key dates along with an aggregated snapshot of all investment accounts on the custom wealth management client profile in Microsoft Dynamics CRM as seen below, financial advisors and their client service support teams can collaborate more effectively, be more in tune with the overall state of the client relationship, and be more prepared for future upcoming client meetings.
As mentioned before on the , workflows can even be leveraged to automate the tracking and scheduling of many of these important follow-up touches and appointments, particularly in the areas of client onboarding, ongoing client review meetings, and educational and prospecting seminars. Having a more defined and consistent service methodology in place will enable financial advisory firms to connect more frequently with investors to help them feel more comfortable with current market conditions. Utilizing CRM to stay in touch with clients more often and cultivate deeper relationships to better gage their investor sentiments will help advisors more effectively assist their clients in meeting their long-term financial goals and prevent them from missing out on extraordinary bull markets.
If you are a large B/D or growing investment advisory firm looking for a more scalable and flexible CRM platform to enhance the productivity, performance, and level of service provided by your financial advisors, please contact info@customereffective.com. Our custom Wealth Management-focused CRM solution can definitely help you better connect with your investors and attract and retain more top-producers.
Post by: Kevin Wessels, Customer EFfective, Florida, Georgia Microsoft Dynamics CRM
