The board of directors of The Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA) sat with AdvisorOne at IMCA's annual conference in National Harbor, Md. last week for a discussion of the organization's response to the needs of its members in the current market and regulatory environments.
"We're moving forward as an organization, but we're moving forward under change," said Betsy Piper-Bach, IMCA's chairwoman as well as vice president and COO for NADA Retirement Administrators.
"This change will require changing skills and knowledge on the part of the advisor," added Sean Walters, IMCA's executive director and CEO.
In addition to Piper-Bach and Walters, other board members in attendance included John Moninger, executive vice president of advisory and brokerage consulting services for LPL Financial; Tony Davidow, managing director and portfolio strategist for Guggenheim Investments; Mike Dieschbourg, managing director at Broadmark Asset Management; Stewart Koesten, president of KHC Wealth Management, and Kevin Sanchez, senior institutional consultant with UBS Institutional Consulting.
"The CIMA designation was our core offering as an organization," Piper-Bach said. "But CIMA wasn't accounting for estate planning, tax planning and other needs that would take the advisor to that next level, so we developed the CPWA. Now, we need even more than that to continue gaining the needed expertise."
Koesten noted that when it came to IMCA's designations and certificates, advisors might spend a bit more, but they have specialized tools to use immediately in their practice.
"The new certificate or designation [to which Piper-Bach referred] is one that will have to be sold because there are some people who are hungry for it, and there are some that need to be hungry for it," he said.
Sanchez added that advisors can leave the conference, go back to their offices on a Tuesday afternoon and immediately use what they've learned.
"It's not theoretical; we demand that our speakers make their presentations actionable," Sanchez said.
"We all remember a small community of institutional consultants at wirehouse," Davidow responded. "Now, RIAs are a core growth strategy for IMCA. We have 8,650 members today, and the track structure we offer at conferences is important because advisor practices are so diverse. We've grown as an organization because our constituents have grown, but also because what they are dealing with has grown."
Attendees are advice providers, and continually want to provide better advice for investors, Moninger added, noting, "They want to know about client issues and how to deal with them, transfer of wealth issues, tax issues and so on. They want to know the most effective way to communicate with clients because it's more about dealing with emotions. Good advice will rely on good partnerships with accountants and lawyers, and it will also be about the particular medium, whether it is web seminars, conference calls or something else." 
The conversation turned to how clients wish to receive information from advisors, and how advisors wish to receive information from IMCA.
"Markets are more complex, driven by the wired world we live in," Dieschbourg began. "This complexity of the markets has made us as an organization think about what we deliver and how we deliver information. For instance, there is a changing definition of risk moving from standard deviation to now viewing risk as the potential loss of capital. We need to provide advisors with tools to make our clients stay in the market and make the complex simple."
Walters (above) compared the situation to general practitioners in medicine, where the advisory field has now gotten "too complicated and advisors need more skills in order to handle it."
"As a result, teams have evolved and are still evolving," Davidow said.
Sanchez says he roams the conference floor to converse with attendees, asking them why they're there; why they're taking the time and expense away from their practices.
Davidow (left) added that the organization has an obligation to its membership to explore what new regulations mean to their business and their clients.
