The November cover story of Research magazine, "The New Retirement Pro," focuses on how to thrive in the growing and highly competitive field of retirement income advice. Ellen Uzelac speaks with industry leaders and looks closely at the latest ideas.
The serious difficulties of systems integration in post-merger financial institutions are the subject of "A Tech Nightmare for Advisors," by Jane Wollman Rusoff.
In the latest Finke on Finance feature, Michael Finke of Texas Tech looks at the science of neuroeconomics and how its insights can help advisors work more effectively with clients. Meanwhile, Sales Seminar columnist Bill Good crunches the numbers from his cold calling survey and helps readers with their scripts.
Global Economy columnist Alexei Bayer sees "No Quick Fix" for the U.S. economy, and Senior Editor Kenneth Silber assesses the outlook for financial advisors to run for political office.
Click through the following slides to preview the November issue of Research magazine.
The New Retirement ProEllen Uzelac reports on new and innovative approaches in retirement income advice. Excerpt:
How do you provide high-level retirement income advice to your clients? It's a single question with multiple answers—and it's reshaping the landscape as advisors search for ways to address what could be the toughest challenge of their careers.
"This is a much bigger 'big picture' change than most people are comfortable with. In retirement, you must operate at the household level, not the account level. In the investment management days, we were able to limit ourselves to working with a client's financial capital. In retirement, it's human capital, social capital and financial capital," observes François Gadenne, chairman of the Retirement Income Industry Association. "A lot of advisors have been in denial. But you can't outrun this. To do this job today, the investment manager has a new name: retirement management professional."
In the latest "Finke on Finance" article, Michael Finke of Texas Tech writes on the cutting-edge science of neuroeconomics. Excerpt:
As part of a simulated stock market game, student subjects at Texas Tech sit inside a machine that resembles a landlocked white submarine. There they pick investment advisors who give them portfolio recommendations. Investment returns are random and, when they drop, Professor Russell James notes an activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex—the part of the brain commonly used in detecting errors and comparing numbers.
When an advisor makes a random recommendation that turns out well, a completely different part of the brain associated with visual recognition of faces (the advisor's) lights up. When the student focuses on numbers, and particularly numbers with a negative value, they tend to fire the advisor and move on.
Jane Wollman Rusoff details the serious challenges involved in post-merger tech integration. Excerpt:
No one presumes that, with the merger of two great big financial services firms, technology integration will be headache-free. But would you believe: A nightmare? Scary? Painful? Agonizing?
Indeed, that's how a broad spectrum of industry participants, in interviews with Research, described such complicated conversions.
