The day-to-day responsibilities of a Financial Advisor
What are the responsibilities of a Financial Advisors day-to-day? As a Financial Advisor, you will be responsible for advising people in terms of their finances to help them maintain and expand their wealth. It is an extremely important and rewarding job, due to the important role finances play in people’s lives.
It is typically a well-paid career path too, with lots of career progression and earning opportunity. Due to this, it is no surprise that a career as a Financial Advisor is attractive to many. However, to lots of people the day-to-day tasks a Financial Advisor undertakes are somewhat of a mystery. In this blog, we will uncover the regular tasks you can expect to complete during your future career.
Of course, there is bound to be variation within an Advisors role depending on whether they are restricted or independent, employed or self-employed, within a small, medium or large size firm and many other contributing factors.
Some overarching responsibilities include:
Meeting with clients
A big part of a Financial Advisor’s day-to-day role will be meeting with clients and potential clients. Your purpose as a Financial Advisor is to help plan and deliver on a client’s financial needs. Therefore, this can only be achieved by meeting your clients to discuss their needs and potential solutions. Depending on various reasons, this meeting could take place either in-person, via video conferencing or over the telephone. It is important for Financial Advisor’s to maintain client relationships and meeting regularly with clients certainly helps with this. Also, when meeting clients, it presents opportunity to network and build your client bank through referrals, which is key to growing your business.
Investment and pension advice
Lots of people who seek a Financial Advisor will be searching for investment and pension advice. This is a very personal service and requires extensive knowledge and planning. The markets are continually changing so it is vital that a Financial Advisor stays aware. Equally, it is important to get to know your client’s finances and their preferences. Each client will have different attitudes to risk, timescales, number of dependents, current and future earnings, and access to cash which will all affect the advice you provide.
Portfolio management
- Portfolio management is an important task you will complete for your clients. Your clients will all have different financial situations thus needing different types of portfolio management. Some different aspects of portfolio management that your role may include are:
- Asset allocation- Asset allocation is the process of spreading a client’s money to different asset classes. This reduces financial risk for clients due to the multiple asset clauses.
- Diversification- Diversification is essentially cushioning a portfolio, to minimise risk. Instead of putting all investments into one stock or industry, diversification is the practice of investing in multiple. Therefore if one of your investments crashes, you are cushioned by your others. International diversification is a common request for investment portfolios as it minimises risk to a client’s overall finances. For example, a client who has an investment portfolio that has shares in the American, Asian and English markets may not be as directly affected if the FTSE crashes, due to the Dow Jones and the Nikkei being independent markets. Therefore, will react differently despite turmoil that may be going on in other parts of the world.
Retirement Planning
A very common service that Financial Advisors offer is retirement planning. Retiring can be a nerve-racking thing when it comes to finances, yet most people’s retirement aim is relaxation. Making advice the perfect solution! Each person has a different vision for what their retirement will look like, some will want to downsize whereas others want to live lavishly. This is something an Advisor will have to learn about their clients, and then advise accordingly.
Estate Planning
Many people see the value in estate planning that a Financial Advisor can offer making it a popular and frequent service for most Advisors. Estate planning considers things like taxation so that a client’s family or next of kin can benefit as much as possible from your clients assets. Estate planning can’t help avoid inheritance tax, however, there are different reliefs / liabilities that a client wouldn’t necessarily know about, without an Advisor. Again, this is an extremely personal service and takes careful consideration and extensive knowledge of the clients finances, assets and investments.
Staying up-to-date
One of the most overlooked parts of being a Financial Advisor is the necessity to keep up to date with the ever changing financial landscape. Although you will naturally have a good awareness of any economic changes due to the nature of financial advice, it is important that you expand on this. Many Financial Advisors advise their clients on international markets too, to be a good advisor you must keep your knowledge up to date. Being such a fit and proper industry, the Financial Services industry is heavily regulated, new regulations are likely to be made throughout your career so it is wise to keep yourself aware of them.
There is a range of tasks a Financial Advisor will complete in a day, although a lot of them will be repeated many times throughout their role. However, financial advice is extremely personal to the client and the markets at that particular time. This gives you a level of variation that can keep your role exciting and fun.
If you are an aspiring Financial Advisor and want to learn more Call us now at 0208 0044 154 to have a free, no-pressure chat with one of our experts.
We have a number of brilliant Financial Advisor roles available, which could be a great fit for you.