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Written by: Chayton Allen
Time is a commodity that we as people can never get back. The clock constantly ticks away and each day 24 hours are gone and they cannot be bought, bargained, or willed back into existence. So what are you doing with your 24 hours in the day? A financial advisor needs to make sure that the time you spend working is spent productively. A financial advisor’s job, in short, is to manage their clients’ finances throughout the day and provide great service to their customers as well.
Although both these things are a handful on their own, it seems advisors need another set of hands in order to grow their business and put out valuable content to stay competitive in the digital market. Wealth firms not having an efficient way to ensure advisors are following regulatory standards and producing brand-compliant content is wasting crucial amounts of time and resources reviewing content. With fluctuating rules and regulations for a variety of governing bodies – IIROC, MFDA, FINRA, the SEC to name a few – keeping up with these constant changes could be considered a job of its own. It is no surprise that wealth firms always want to be compliant and avoid any repercussions due to disobedience.
Lengthy Compliance Process
Having an inefficient compliance process eats up time, is tedious, and altogether a waste of precious resources. While financial advisors are awaiting approval, they have no choice but to sit and twiddle their thumbs. Thus are unable to deliver content to reach their clients simply because the process is time-consuming.
Through client communications, advertising, blog posts and social media financial advisors may use a number of different channels to produce content. The development of technology over time has sped up a financial advisor’s capability to produce content. Creating a disconnect between compliance departments’ approval time and the high volume of content that can be produced through these channels. To overcome this content approval challenge, a marketing team can try to greenlight a lot for advisors all the time but it takes away from both the advisor’s and the marketer’s valuable time.
As a financial advisor, the question becomes would you dedicate a full day towards compliance issues and content approval? No of course not, you would like to save precious time along with less content-heavy lifting. A financial advisor should not have to worry about working through all compliance issues manually.
Archive Records
Keeping records for 7 years because of regulatory rules for multiple advisors may sound simple, however, it is just the opposite. Having to manually file the following files: notes on all client reviews, discussions, questions, and correspondence, including copies of email communications, and more can bog down advisors and compliance departments. The main communication channels like blogs, websites, and external pages all need to be accounted for. Currently, advisors take screenshots of their webpages to have a record of changes that can be historically accurate if called upon in an audit. Websites and external pages are a difficult thing to capture every time an update is done to them, very time-consuming, tedious, and not to mention the filing.
Imagine in a 7-year timeframe how many pieces of content that are created by an advisor. Now, multiply that by one hundred advisors or one thousand advisors within that 7-year period, things can get pretty messy pretty fast without the right system in place. When an auditor requests documents it’s very stressful trying to retrieve the right information, for the right advisor, and for the right time period. Companies, marketers, compliance officers, and financial advisors all want to get through an audit as painlessly and headache-free as possible. To do that, they need to be able to easily store and retrieve data in a digital format, something that should be done automatically.
The question becomes can your firm produce the documents auditors want at a moment’s notice? If the firm or a financial advisor cannot produce those documents, they could find themselves in hot water. According to an article by Investment Executive, “If you’re not, the consequences can range from a warning to terms and conditions being placed on your registration or being deregistered altogether.” Mistakes are human and we all make them no doubt but these mistakes can get you in trouble with some regulatory bodies.
“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” Theophrastus
Content Library
Most enterprises have advisors make their own content from scratch and wait for approval from the compliance department. Creating your own content is difficult especially when having to do it all the time. Trying to balance the regular financial advisor activities (financial planning, trading, tax strategies, etc) while also producing content is not an easy task.
A content library would be a huge asset to advisors, allowing them to get time back and use it towards planning and educating in finance and not producing content on a large scale. Having a library of pre-approved content would be the dream of most financial advisors. It accelerates the publication time as the compliance review has already been done.
Solving Ineffective Compliance Processes
How do you make sure the working hours advisors are putting in are as productive as possible? Simple. Get a solution to all the problems listed above, the overall inefficient compliance process can be taken away with our Digital Agent Platform. Digital Agent utilizes a quick and painless approval process that allows advisors to be in line with brand compliance and brand consistency.
An auditor function that puts firms, compliance departments, and advisors’ minds at ease. A great example of this is our visual website retrieval, being able to go back and pull up exactly what your site looked like a year, three years, or even 7 years in the past. Digital Agent has a pre-approved content library allowing advisors to utilize videos, articles, web pages, and email campaigns that have already been approved and are ready for use. Fix a slew of your financial advisor issues, book a demo, and learn more about Digital Agent today.
Related: Fixing 7 Critical Mistakes Made in Advisor Email Marketing