Financial Advisor Transition

To understand the full impact of AI on advisor productivity, it’s important to look beyond speed alone. The more relevant question is whether efficiency gains are creating meaningful breathing room or simply raising expectations and expanding the scope of work.

I’m all about trying to build bridges and fix things, and I am also a realist. I often tell clients there is a right way, and then there is what you can get done within your environment. I’ll always lean toward the second one.

The College for Financial Planning is a degree-granting institution offering various financial certification programs. It provides graduate degree, non-degree and continuing professional education programs for students. Founded in 1972, today it is part of Kaplan Financial and has trained over 165,000 professionals.

Scalable personalization means saving time while not sacrificing the “secret sauce” that is unique to your practice. Time savings can come from scaling portfolio construction via model portfolios or direct indexing, adding tools or talent to complement strengths, and using technology like AI.

The thinking behind space solar makes some sense: The sun doesn’t always shine on Earth, which means solar panels on the ground aren’t always gathering energy. There are no clouds to block the sun in space, so aside from a couple of times per year around the equinoxes, panels in GEO are constantly bombarded with solar rays.

Sophisticated clients and institutional prospects are already asking wealth management firms about AI governance. The firms with coherent answers are winning trust their competitors cannot buy back quickly.

Listening is a skill that can be taught, can be learned, and can be practiced. If a client doesn’t think their advisor is really listening to them, they might take that opportunity to find another advisor who does.

SpaceX also is ramping up its spending. The company said in April it’s struck an agreement for the right to acquire artificial intelligence startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or to pay $10 billion for the companies’ work together.

For many high-performing advisory teams, the challenge has never been ambition or capability. The missing ingredient has simply been an operational structure designed to support the level of success they have already surpassed. High-performing teams that tap into this reality strengthen firms from the top down and deliver exceptional service with the systems required to sustain it.

If you read my column, you know I am a proponent of following the SHIFT format. First, get the team together to identify who you want to be as a team and what success looks like to you. Make sure everyone is headed toward the same outcome and cares about the same goals.

A few weeks ago, I sat down at my laptop and built a trading platform. It connects to three financial exchanges. It ingests news from RSS feeds, web searches, Reddit and Twitter.

No one likes that heart-drop feeling of missing an important detail. And yet, this happens all too often when it comes to healthcare planning. Healthcare and health insurance are complex topics. Without an expert or the right resources, it can be very difficult for financial advisors to do on their own.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is no stranger to the stratosphere, and neither is its coming initial public offering.

Volatility, tighter margins, and rising client expectations are prompting many Advisors to reassess whether their current broker-dealer or firm is still the best long-term fit. If you’re considering a transition, in this article we will discuss 10 essential questions to help guide your decision.

Without a clear owner, even the best marketing plans collect dust, while client work takes priority. But during those times when you're laser-focused on serving clients, the marketing that should be growing your practice isn't happening. Ideal prospects are finding someone else. Referral sources go quiet.

As the spring session for my graduate class, Leadership Lab, comes to a close I am in Chicago working with middle management leaders in the financial advisory space on leading teams. It seems appropriate at this time to offer some reminders about simple things you can do to be a better leader for your team.

Every prospect is different. They have different interests, different decision timelines, and different levels of engagement. Treating them all the same because your CRM can't segment effectively is leaving money on the table.

Would you buy OpenAI’s shares even though the transaction might expose you to a liquidity crunch? SoftBank Group Corp.’s founder Masayoshi Son did just that.

Choosing when to invest is one of the most important factors influencing your retirement security. The best time to start building retirement savings is after your first paycheck. Starting that early allows you to maximize how much time you have to save and how much time those dollars have to grow, thanks to compounding interest.

Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, said at a finance conference in October 2023 that he and his “CEO friends” were running a betting pool on when the first one-person billion-dollar company would be created thanks to artificial intelligence.

When I teach my graduate classes in leadership, we talk about the essence of motivation. Even the best leaders cannot motivate other people to do something. They can create an environment within which the person becomes self-motivated. But motivation is intrinsic.

Economic conditions are set to be even rockier in 2026, as the US-Israel war with Iran has set inflation on a continued upward trajectory and further rankled markets. Even if there were a de-escalation in the conflict, a domino effect has begun.

A strong professional network does far more than provide camaraderie. It’s a growth engine, a source of expertise, a safety net, and often a long-term competitive advantage. The path forward might not be another software upgrade or marketing campaign — it might simply begin with finding the right peer group.

In essence, the IPO is an acknowledgement that the ChatGPT-maker, which just raised $122 billion from investors at a valuation of $852 billion, needs what seems to be an endless amount of money to fund its race for artificial general intelligence.

Whatever you end up doing, make sure you are authentic and honest in your approach. Clients see right through a request or ask that you are uncomfortable making. You have to know what you want, find words that are right for you, and proceed accordingly.

In the competitive and client-centric world of wealth management advisory services, a strong business development strategy is more than a growth tool; it’s a necessity. While digital marketing, webinars and in-house events have their place, two of the most effective and scalable channels for high-quality lead generation remain referrals and centers of influence (COIs).

Call it the season of IPO prep. Recent launches and announcements from OpenAI and arch rival Anthropic are aimed at laying the groundwork to go public in late 2026 or early 2027, and for OpenAI, which just closed a $122 billion funding round that values it at $852 billion.

SpaceX has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter, bringing billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI company closer to delivering the biggest-ever listing.

Big names in crypto, payments and cloud infrastructure are racing to build the financial plumbing for a world in which AI agents — not humans — handle transactions on the internet.

This week’s column is dedicated to improving two of the most critical skills: asking strong open-ended questions and listening in an active and reflective way. Let’s start with the harder part — listening.

How should RIAs think about advisor cash compensation? This article focuses on the salary, bonus, and benefits arrangements commonly used in the industry and typically documented in investment advisor representative (IAR) agreements.

OpenAI has completed a deal to raise $122 billion from investors at an $852 billion valuation, marking the company’s largest funding round to date by far and bolstering its costly push for more chips, data centers and talent.

Ask your advisors to do a time tracking sheet for two weeks. This is often annoying to people in the beginning — it’s another thing to do. However, in all cases, I have found it to be eye-opening to someone to figure out where their time goes.

The advisors who build the strongest client relationships aren't necessarily the ones with the most resources. They're the ones who help clients feel the value of those resources consistently. You have more to offer your clients than you're probably telling them. Be bold. Tell the story.

Understanding how traditional RIA growth models have evolved is essential for advisors making deliberate decisions about the structure, scale, and long-term direction of their firms.

Nvidia Corp. executives will likely need to deliver a surprise at the chipmaker’s annual AI conference that begins Monday to spark a rally in the moribund stock.

Sophisticated email marketing requires automation: welcome sequences for new subscribers, nurture campaigns based on content interests, and reengagement sequences for inactive prospects.

You might want to think about what I often call “internal PR”. Your leaders are focused on other things and are likely unaware of all that is happening directly with their advisors — and definitely with clients.

Big Tech’s consolidation of power seemed a foregone conclusion even as Sam Altman’s OpenAI sparked an artificial intelligence boom with ChatGPT.

Netflix Inc.’s stock price is staging a dramatic reversal triggered by management’s decision to walk away from its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. late last month.

The recent rotation from growth to value is well documented. While the return divergences between technology stocks and materials or industrials stocks are significant, they do not tell the whole story. There are also extreme return differentials between broad industries and their sub-industries. In this article, we address the divergence of the broad technology sector and the software-as-a-service (SaaS) sub-industry.

Amazon.com Inc. may be a leader in the artificial intelligence race, but investors are increasingly unwilling to pay up for the cost of maintaining that position.

OpenAI has raised $110 billion in a deal that values the startup at $730 billion, representing the ChatGPT maker’s largest funding round to date and bolstering its costly push to secure more computing power and talent for AI development.

While most ultra-wealthy people may think they’re like everyone else, they’re not. They have unique financial needs and challenges. At some point — often after making avoidable financial errors — they recognize that they need assistance managing the complexities of their everyday lives.

Our team at The Collaborative lost one of our long-time coaches this week to cancer. Cathy Manning was not only an amazing coach, she was a dear friend of mine from the time we worked at John Hancock together in Investment Marketing decades ago. This column is dedicated to some of the Cathy-isms I learned over the years watching her adeptly coach our clients.

Strategic succession planning executed well in advance can dramatically enhance your practice's worth while protecting both client relationships and your financial future. Let’s explore key moves for maximizing your valuation and ensuring a lasting legacy.

As long as I have been writing this column and working in this business, I’ve learned there is still a first time for everything — and this is the first time I have ever heard this dilemma from an advisor.

Adani Group plans to invest $100 billion by 2035 to develop green-powered, AI-ready data centers as billionaire Gautam Adani seeks to capitalize on India’s bid to emerge as a hub for artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

Thrive Capital, the venture capital firm founded by Josh Kushner, has raised more than $10 billion — its largest fund ever, giving the firm an expanded war chest to invest in areas ranging from artificial intelligence applications and infrastructure to space, robotics and life sciences.

And so it goes in the world of private credit. Time and again, companies widely regarded as software firms are frequently labeled otherwise by lenders, a practice that raises fresh questions over the full extent of their exposure as the threat from artificial intelligence upends markets and rattles investors.