Financial Market Volatility: How Confident Are You About Your Team’s Ability To Calm Fears?
Goodbye, tranquil markets. Fear and volatility had indeed “left the building,” but must have forgotten a pair of blue suede shoes in the dressing room because last week the Dow plunged more than 1,000 points — twice.
Your field is the first line of defense when the tough questions start rolling in. Can they truly calm the fears and deliver your firm’s unique position? One thing is certain: those that do so effectively can capitalize on the additional assets inevitably coming into play due to knee jerk reactions to the market swings.
Last week, thousands of wholesalers and advisors across dozens of financial services organizations flocked to Allego videos for real-time updates on the latest market commentary and portfolio positioning by top portfolio managers and strategists at their firms. Traffic spiked 55% amongst financial services firms, including over half of the top fund managers and leading advisory teams who use the tool to keep their field force up to speed.
Times of market disruption highlight the shortcomings of traditional approaches to training and supporting financial services professionals. Situations like this underscore the importance of tools like Allego. Nuveen, for example, was able to stay ahead when Brexit was announced by using video updates to give wholesalers much-needed perspective on the issue within 24 hours. Competitor firms relying on WebEx’s, conference calls and email communications struggled to field the barrage of questions coming in that next business day.
And that’s not all. Another key trend always seems to emerge among financial services organizations using Allego in the days and weeks following a market disruption. Curious? Check out this video:
Video Transcript
Quick question. How were you able to communicate your firm’s unique response to the incredible market turbulence on Monday. More importantly, do you have visibility into their ability to consistently articulate this with anxious clients? I’m Erika Bzdel and after spending 15 years….now lead Allego Financial Services.
Step 1: Calm the Fear of Clients and Advisors
If you are like most of our clients, you scheduled an all-hands market call and/or Webex for the masses. Unfortunately, we know that this shotgun approach provides little visibility into who it actually reached and more importantly, were they able to calm the fears of frantic clients and advisors. As we all know, recent events and headline risk is becoming more of the norm and your field needs to be armed with dynamic information in a way that they can absorb and more important recall when they most need it. And that’s when they have a meeting and/or call in front of them.
Some interesting things we saw – on Monday alone we had over 20,000 views of market commentary, portfolio position, risk allocation information from our advisors/wholesaler on the platform.
Step 2: Increase Collaboration between Advisors, Wholesalers, and Managers
Subsequently, we are now seeing in the follow up 48 hours an enormous uptick in collaboration between Advisors/wholesalers and managers as the field reacts to customer concerns and objections and they are looking for best practices. With disruptive headlines coming almost on a daily basis, this is a trend that we will absolutely see an increase and we will keep you posted and provide some food for thought on ways your peers driving efficiencies and consistent messaging in the ever-changing landscape.
Have a great week!
