4 ways to win younger clients

By AdviceBridge

The number of ageing clients is a concern for many financial planners and advisers.

Schroders’ survey found that many advisers were concentrating their efforts on older high net worth clients because they said it was challenging to deliver advice to younger clients while remaining profitable.

Why do I need to attract younger clients?

Advisers who want to keep growing their business (or even just maintain its current level of income, as older clients pass away), and have a firm to either sell or pass on, cannot ignore the need to take on more younger clients.

Jason Whitcombe, a Chartered Financial Planner with Progeny Group says: “While younger clients may not appear lucrative, you need to look longer term. These are the clients in their 30s who are building up wealth they will need to invest or manage in their 50s.”

  • There also remains untapped wealth from the baby boomer generation. This is still being passed down to younger generations – that is, their children and grandchildren – who will need help to manage it.
  • Advisers who invest in expanding their client base will stand to gain long term. They will also do their bit to plug the UK’s infamous “advice gap”.
  • If that isn’t enough, then a survey carried out by Sanlam and Unbiased found that the best age to seek financial advice for retirement is 25, giving individuals ample time to save larger pots for their later years.

1. Communicate with younger clients

If you want to attract more clients from Generations X and Y (age 40-56 and 25-40 respectively) then you need to learn to speak their language – namely, a tech-based one.

Robo-advisors and the use of artificial intelligence is growing in popularity. While it might appear to challenge the traditional adviser-client relationship (and its profitability), there are ways it can be used to complement the advice process.

Chapters Financial launched its own financial advice website, SaidSo. The site started out with robo-adviser aspirations but is now primarily aimed at providing information advice for the under 40s.

To do: You don’t need to set up a robo-adviser arm to your business, but having a social media strategy where you give younger clients information, or even hints and tips – such as #lifehacks or #moneyhacks – can draw them into your client base.

​2. Use tech to keep it personal

Clients in their 30s, 40s, and even their 50s, are more often than not attempting to achieve multiple goals at once. For example, they may be trying to:

  • Save up for their first home
  • Keep up a certain lifestyle
  • Buy a second home to rent out or holiday in
  • Pay for their children’s education
  • Retire with confidence and ease
  • Help with the healthcare cost of ageing parents.

Although they don’t have time for too many face-to-face meetings, they’re probably the clients who are in most need of a financial planner.

To do: The pandemic has meant more people are comfortable using virtual meeting software and tech, such as Skype or Zoom. Use these tools to offer more flexible ways to connect with your clients, and you can also record your meetings to remind you of anything you need to follow up on.

3. Deliver a multigenerational offering

This is where financial planners can really improve their service offering in a way that will help keep existing clients happy while bringing younger ones on board.

As one adviser pointed out, “It would be a real shame to struggle financially while you have small children to find that at the age of 70 you are a millionaire as a result of inheritance.”

Having a multigenerational service proposition means you can help parents with other financial planning needs further down the road, such as Inheritance Tax or making a will.

To do: Consider a service proposition that charges a monthly fee to offer general family financial planning. However, note that:

  • It may be worth offering virtual meetings to overcome issues of geography (for example, your client’s children may not live in the local area).
  • Your client’s children may already have a relationship with another financial advisor or planner which they’re already happy with, so you may meet some resistance to change.

4. Plug the “advice gap” by hiring across the age ranges

While younger generations may not present an obvious source of profit to a fee-based financial planner, the fact is there is an “advice gap”.

As banks no longer give as much advice to their customers, and advisers are growing older, firms need to be thinking about how they can engage with younger clients.

To do: Consider your own financial planning team – by ensuring that you recruit across a wide age range, you will not only diversify your workforce but also be more attractive to younger clients.

How AdviceBridge can help

AdviceBridge has developed a platform that helps financial planners deliver personalised financial advice to clients in an efficient and cost-effective way, specifically for those less profitable and harder to service clients.

The white-label app gathers personal and financial information from the client digitising many of the manual, time-consuming processes, which allows the planner to focus on the relationship and not admin, research or reports. It also calculates the income the client will receive on a monthly basis in retirement, alongside a “safe to spend” figure of what they can spend on a monthly basis currently, whilst showing the best way to invest across different tax wrappers.

The app enables financial planners to communicate and engage with clients from all walks of life, no matter where they are, specifically those who traditionally prove unprofitable due to the accumulating phase of their financial planning journey.

Get in touch

To find out how AdviceBridge can help you improve scheme member communication and

engagement, please get in touch by email or call us on 020 3925 3850. You can also visit our website to book a quick demo with our friendly team.