How Financial Advisors Can Achieve Scale and Deliver Personalized Client Experiences

Financial advisors and their clients continue to face headwinds from persistent inflation, market pressure, geopolitical uncertainties, and concerns about a recession. We sat down with Stephanie Mead, FactSet’s Vice President, Regional Director of Americas Wealth Solutions, to discuss how advisors can successfully navigate the environment and serve clients’ needs for regular contact, insights, and advice.

FactSet Insight: What are some of the main challenges financial advisors face in this environment?

Stephanie: The current macro environment—sticky inflation, market turbulence, liquidity events, and concerns about credit quality, for example—continues to pressure advisors’ operating models. This can pose profitability problems if there isn’t sufficient scale in their businesses and, at the same time, sufficient focus to sustain and improve client engagement. Additionally, advisors are forced to traverse countless apps and portals for access to key information on clients, markets, and research. The bottom-line challenge for advisors is achieving scale and efficiency while delivering the personal touch.

FactSet Insight: Could you elaborate on that?

Stephanie: Clients increasingly expect personalized advice and access to relevant market and portfolio insights where and when they need them, especially in periods of uncertainty in the economy and capital markets. Meeting these expectations can be challenging as clients are becoming more demanding and discerning. For example, according to the J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Full-Service Investor Satisfaction Study, investor satisfaction with full-service investment advisors dipped 17 points (on a 1,000-point scale) year over year. Per the study, investors indicated that only 11% of advisors deliver comprehensive advice.

FactSet Insight: Given the link to profitability, how can advisors scale their practices?

Stephanie: Technology can help advisors achieve scale, grow their businesses and deliver a personalized and engaging client experience. Additionally, technology can drive advisor efficiency and provide seamless access to actionable portfolio intelligence. For example, combining each advisor’s book of business with FactSet’s differentiated content and robust analytics—within a single, configurable platform—saves advisors time and eliminates the dreadful swivel chair effect.

FactSet’s Advisor Dashboard surfaces curated and impactful insights around portfolio exposures, ESG insights, IPS drift alerts, performance, and risk as well as relevant news, research, signals, and events. In addition, with just a single click of a mouse, an advisor can easily identify which clients are impacted by a particular market development and is empowered to deliver personalized and engaging insights to their clients.

Ms. Stephanie Mead is Vice President, Regional Director of Americas Wealth Solutions at FactSet, based in Boston, Massachusetts. In this role, she is responsible for growing and supporting FactSet’s Wealth Management clients. Prior to FactSet, she spent 3.5 years working in various operations roles at a large custodial bank. Ms. Mead earned a Bachelor of Science with a focus in Finance from Ithaca College. 

This blog post is for informational purposes only. The information contained in this blog post is not legal, tax, or investment advice. FactSet does not endorse or recommend any investments and assumes no liability for any consequence relating directly or indirectly to any action or inaction taken based on the information contained in this article.