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Trust is core to the relationship that financial professionals build with their clients, but certain issues that impact that relationship are out of the advisor’s control. Performance reporting is clearly under your control, and our research shows what advisors need to do to respond to their clients’ concerns.
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For example, the advisor-client relationship is governed by "principal-agent" dynamics, where the agent is acting on the principal’s behalf. Specifically, the advisor (agent) has a deep set of skills and expertise and implements financial decisions on behalf of the client (principal). Even though investors don't have high levels of sophistication when it comes to financial planning and investment management, they still need to determine whether their advisor is doing a good job. That's why investment reporting and financial-goal progress takes on such a central role within the relationship. It's one of the few ways that investors can monitor performance around a topic that is not their core area of expertise, and ensure that their agent is acting on their behalf.
The two highest priorities to investors when it comes to investment performance reporting are that fees are fully disclosed and reports are simple and easy to understand. That was a key finding in our research, as shown below:
Those were two of 15 different attributes from which investors could choose. To put things into perspective, the next five highest priorities combined were less than the individual weight that investors placed on these priorities.
For a financial advisor to leverage investment performance reporting as a cornerstone to improving trust and strengthening the relationship, then prominently disclosing fees and making sure information is presented in a way that is simple and easy to understand are clear first steps.
However, there's a deeper issue that impacts clients’ perceptions of their investment reports. To investors, it appears that the financial advisor creates the information from investment reports. Industry insiders know that transactions can be aggregated at the broker-dealer level, and that third-party technology providers often perform investment metrics. But the "white-labeled" report that the client receives appears to come from the financial professional, along with all the calculations that the report entails.
In new research that we just published entitled The State of Investor Trust and Transparency, we set out to measure whether "information source" – i.e. that performance reports appeared to come from the agent in the relationship – impacted investors' level of trust regarding the accuracy and reliability of their investment reports.
Specifically, investors were asked:
"If an unbiased 3rd party were to calculate your rate of return, how confident are you that they would get the same result as your financial advisor / 401(k) plan provider?"
In addition to rate of return, investors were also asked about their confidence in accuracy when compared to an unbiased third-party about the following metrics:
- Fees
- Target benchmark
- Progress towards financial goal achievement
- Risk
These metrics were chosen based on CFA Institute research[1] that found these metrics to be most important to investors. The following graphic shows, by reporting metric, the proportion of investors that were "not highly confident" that an unbiased third-party would get the same result as their financial advisor / 401(k) provider:
Source: Marketing/Investor Transparency Study/Articles/CFA Institute Article/nhc-by-metric.png)
By David Thompson and Benjamin Gross, read the full article here.
