The Financial Services Institute marked its first decade of existence during the opening session of the FSI's OneVoice conference in Washington, D.C., with FSI CEO Dale Brown saying the location made sense because "that's where the action is" for the broker-dealer group's advocacy efforts.
Brown promised that the conference, which has 775 attendees, would include the "most provocative and relevant content we've ever had," for which he credited conference chairwoman Amy Webber, president of Cambridge Investment Research.
More kudos for Webber's programming work came from FSI's 2014 chairman, Mike Mungenast of ProEquities, who also called on the assembled BD home office attendees to grow FSI's membership: "We need more firms" to subsidize FSI membership of individual financial advisors, he said.
That's exactly what ProEquities did itself, and in a media briefing on Tuesday morning, Mungenast said that when it withdrew its subsidized membership, more than 90% of ProEquities' reps renewed their membership. As for other goals during his chairmanship, Mungenast listed work on financial literacy and elder issues.
Webber then introduced the keynote speaker, business consultant and author John Spence, who regaled attendees with a blizzard of advice delivered in a rapid-fire manner to a receptive audience. Beginning by noting that "for those who are prepared, chaos brings opportunity," Spence urged the audience to strive for "nimbleocity," a term defined as a business strategy that combined nimbleness with velocity — enacting change quickly. Successful managers, he said, recognize patterns in their markets and then react quickly to take advantage of those patterns.
