Are you prepared?

Chris Freeman

Financial advisers will need to change their approach to attracting and servicing clients if they want their businesses to survive another 15 years, warns BTFinancial Group head of wrap solutions Chris Freeman.

According to Freeman, while advisers operating in the past 15 years have serviced their clients well, they have also been extremely lucky, but this luck won’t last forever.

“In the past 15 years our key client base, the baby boomers, grew by 50 per cent,” he explained.

“In the next 15 years, that client base will grow at less than 1 per cent a year. We won’t have clients knocking at our doors, foreheads creased with worry about retirement.

“Advisers are going to have to think about how they position their businesses for a different type of customer — Generations X and Y — who think differently from their parents.”

“Prospecting for clients is going to be a lot more important as the number is not going to be as plentiful as it has over the last 15 years, so competition, we think, will be more severe.”

In Freeman’s view, the smart advisers are the ones already taking note of their ageing client base and beginning to think about how to replenish it with clients aged in their 20s and 30s.

He and respected social forecaster Bernard Salt will be speaking on this topic at a series of free adviser road shows BT is hosting titled Bridging the Generation Gap.

The presentations commence in Perth on February 21 before moving to Brisbane (February 26), Adelaide (February 27), Melbourne (February 28) and Sydney (March 12).