Rebecca Sheils

Beddoes Institute has announced the 2015 winners and finalists of its inaugural Most Trusted Adviser Network (MTA) Awards, recognising the best of the best MTA advisers and advice practices, as identified by client ratings.

Overall, nine financial advisers took out the four national and ten state adviser awards, with eight financial advice practices taking out the five national and ten state practice awards. Of these, the Securitor Financial Group network of practices and advisers took out six of the nine national awards, with the Millennium3 and Hillross Financial Services networks taking out the remaining three national awards.

“To be a Most Trusted Adviser Network Awards finalist or winner is an incredibly prestigious and desirable title, particularly in the current environment where consumers want greater reassurance that they have chosen the right adviser to trust,” said Dr Rebecca Sheils, Director of Beddoes Institute.

The new MTA awards identified the Most Trusted Advisers and Practices and Most Recommended Advisers and Practices nationally and within each state in 2015. Winners and finalists were selected based on how they were rated by their clients in Beddoes Institute’s Client Experience Survey during 2015.

Dr Sheils said common to all award winners were consistent strengths across key attributes including client trust, advocacy and willingness to recommend to family and friends[1].

“The MTA awards are based on 3,750 advice client ratings across 137 of Australia’s top MTA advisers and 64 MTA practices,” Dr Sheils said. “Adding further to the robustness of the award process, advisers and practices needed at least 20 client ratings and a response rate of more than 30% to be eligible for an award.”

That said, award recipients typically had a client survey response rate of 47%, which means that the awards are based on a large and representative sample of clients.

“If financial advisers don’t measure trust between clients and advisers, they will ignore it, fail to cultivate it and ultimately risk losing it,” Dr Sheils said. “Measuring trust is important for creating a pathway for improving trust between advisers and the community, as well as building a sustainable advice business, and the best advisers and practices are doing this.”

The Adviser Trust! Score measures a number of qualities of the financial adviser and practice, specifically the quality of client service they offer, the business model they operate under and their reputation.

Advisers with high Adviser Trust! Scores have clients that act on their advice more often, believe they are more on track with their financial plan and are financially better off as a result of working with their adviser, are satisfied with the fees they pay, rate their adviser’s highly on fee transparency and believe they are getting better value than clients of other advisers.

An Adviser Trust! Score of 80 is regarded as excellent with the winners of the 2015 MTA awards having an Adviser Trust! Score of more than 91 (out of 100).

“We have developed a quantitative way to evaluate advisers and to help give consumers peace of mind when selecting an adviser, one that is beyond educational and professional standards, and is based on the voices of real clients,” Dr Sheils said.

In addition to Most Trusted Adviser and Most Trusted Practice, awards were also given for Technical Expertise, Communication and Interpersonal Relationship, Client Engagement, Client

For a complete list of the 2015 MTA Practice of the Year winners and finalists click here.

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[1] The key metrics used to measure ‘trusted referral’ were the Adviser Trust! Score and the Net Promoter Score® which were based on the question “Would you recommend you adviser/practice to your family and friends?”

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Adam Tucker

Beddoes Institute, a data and benchmarking company that works across all major stakeholder groups in the financial services sector, has launched the Adviser Trust! Score.

The trust score is a powerful success metric developed specifically for the Advice sector. Beddoes Institute analysed over 3,000 client ratings for more than 60 different client experience metrics to develop the Adviser Trust! Score.

The Adviser Trust! Score is based on ten questions asked of clients including the widely-recognised Net Promoter Score® in addition to other customer loyalty metrics relevant to the adviser-client relationship. As such, the Adviser Trust! Score moves beyond the NPS by incorporating elements of the adviser-client relationship that are unique to the advice sector, and by doing so, has become a more sensitive and relevant tool for the industry.

The score has been empirically validated by comparing client and business outcomes for advisers with a high Adviser Trust! Score against those with a low score. Advisers with a high score produced better outcomes for clients and greater client satisfaction, whilst simultaneously rapidly growing their advice businesses and increasing profitability.

“It’s an exciting turning point for the advice profession” Dr Tucker, Director of the Beddoes Institute said, “as it paves the way for all levels of the advice sector to engage with the challenge of rebuilding trust with clients and consumers.”

Not only can the Adviser Trust! Score be computed for an individual adviser, but it can also be calculated for a practice and a licensee or dealer group.

In addition, the Adviser Trust! Score can also be used to segment clients – the high value segment being those clients who give their adviser a high Adviser Trust! Score.

“So often client segmentation is based on historical information such as product purchase and spend, which like the historical record of the stock market, is a poor predictor of the future. On the other hand, attitudinal segmentation using the Adviser Trust! Score is a forward measure based on the characteristic of the relationship between the client and adviser/practice” Dr Tucker said.

“It is the clients that give their adviser a high Adviser Trust! Score that will produce growth and profit for advisers, practices and licensees over the next 1-2 years and so it’s vital for practices and licensees to know who these clients are and service them accordingly.”

An Adviser Trust! Score of 85 or more out of 100 is now the key qualifying criteria for the Most Trusted Advisers (MTA) network, a network designed to serve as a ‘trusted adviser’ referral source for consumers.

To help consumers understand the level of excellence achieved by these advisers, the Adviser Trust! Score is accompanied by an Adviser Trust Star Rating, with advisers achieving an Adviser Trust! Score of 85 or more also being awarded a 4 or 5-star rating (out of 5 stars).

Membership of the Most Trusted Advisers network is by invitation only and is based solely on how participating advisers have been rated by their clients. “The advisers we survey include the very best of the best from our corporate partner advisory networks as well as those advisers who have, over the past three years, been finalists and winners of a number of different Award programs including the prestigious AFA Adviser and Practice of the Year Awards,” Dr Tucker said.

Advisers on the Most Trusted Advisers network are assessed every 12-18 months and must re-qualify in order to continue to belong to the network. They cannot pay to belong. Eighteen Advisers (listed below) have recently re-qualified for a second time, demonstrating that they are able to maintain the trust of their clients in an increasingly difficult business environment.

In addition, the 37 new advisers listed below have met the extremely high qualifying criteria for the MTA Network since February 2015 and have now joined the elite group of Most Trusted Advisers taking the total Advisers in the network to over 100.

Consumers can source a trusted adviser in the MTA network via the free Most Trusted Advisers App available on Apple devices as well as through a website.

“The App allows consumers to in effect crowdsource an adviser they know they can trust. It’s a little bit like being able to talk to thousands of neighbours over the back fence about how to find an adviser they can trust,” says Dr Tucker.

For advisers, the Most Trusted Advisers network formalises their clients’ endorsement of their services. “Our message to advisers who are members and those who wish to be is – your clients trust you and now, via the Most Trusted Advisers network and app, others can too.”

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Adam Tucker

From their work with some of Australia’s leading financial advice practices, the Beddoes Institute (Beddoes) has discovered that while practices come in all shapes and sizes, the one key driver of success is a disciplined approach to business planning.

Director of Beddoes, Dr Adam Tucker, says there are four pillars which support business planning and advice practices must excel at all of them if they are to succeed in 2015 and beyond.

The four pillars are:

1. Strategy and Business Management
2. Marketing/Clients
3. Infrastructure and Operations
4. Human Resources

To help advisers understand how to construct and maintain these pillars, Beddoes has created a free interactive tool which takes only a few minutes to use.

“It’s a simple tool that takes far less time to use compared with other planning tools,” Dr Tucker says. “We are calling it The 10-Minute Business Planner.”

Advisers using The 10-Minute Business Planner will find:

• An interactive business checklist
• A business plan scored and prioritized, ready to download
• A growing list of resources to help implement the plan

Dr Tucker says the results and resources will help advisers manage priorities and allocate resources where they’ll do the most good. “We are seeing effective managers regularly reviewing business fundamentals to identify gaps before they become a problem,” he says. “The tool is designed to quickly and easily identify these gaps and thereby help advisers to address them.”

Beddoes is currently producing a snapshot of the advice sector to share with the broader adviser community early next year.

The 10-Minute Business Planner can be downloaded free of charge here.

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Beddoes Institute launches referral app for consumers to advisers.

Beddoes Institute, a data and benchmarking company that works across all major stakeholder groups in the financial services sector, has launched the Most Trusted Advisers network, including a register and consumer-facing App, designed to serve as a referral source for consumers to advisers that other consumers profoundly trust and as a way to champion best of breed advisers.

Beddoes Institute analysed thousands of client ratings from a survey of over 150 advisers and identified an objective benchmark of exceptional client service and performance. That benchmark is a Net Promoter Score (NPS®) of 50 or more.

Speaking at the launch of the Most Trusted Advisers network in Sydney last week, Dr Adam Tucker, Director of Beddoes Institute said, “The NPS® is a powerful loyalty metric which has been linked to profitability and growth in a wide range of businesses. An NPS® higher than zero is regarded as ‘good’ while an NPS® of 50+ is regarded as excellent. Advisers must achieve an NPS® of 50 or more in order to qualify for membership of the Most Trusted Advisers network.”

By way of illustration, Optus has an NPS® of around minus 8, Telstra around minus 13 while airlines collectively average around zero.  “Advisers in the Most Trusted Advisers network outrank consumer brands like eBay, Dan Murphy’s and Emirates*,” Dr Tucker said.  “We are seeing scores in the advice industry that are higher than we have ever seen anywhere.”

Membership of the Most Trusted Advisers networkis by invitation only and is based solely on how participating advisers have been rated by their clients.  “The advisers we surveyed included the very best of the best from corporate partner advisory networks as well as those advisers who have, over the past three years, been finalists and winners of the AFA Adviser of the Year Award,” Dr Tucker said.

The survey is the Beddoes Institute’s Client Experience Survey, part of the Beddoes Institute’s Leading Practices Program. “Most Trusted Advisers deliver significantly better outcomes to their clients,” Dr Tucker said. “Their clients believe they are more on track with their financial plan and are financially better off as a result of working with their adviser compared to clients of other financial advisers.”

Most Trusted Advisers also rated higher on their qualifications, experience and technical skills than other advisers and have better interpersonal skills, Dr Tucker said. “We found that clients of Most Trusted Advisers are more satisfied and have stronger relationships with their advisers than clients of other advisers. We were also very pleased to discover that the advisers currently included on the Most Trusted Advisers network hail from different segments of the industry, including both institutional and non-institutionally aligned licensee groups.”

Advisers on the Most Trusted Advisers network will be assessed every 12-18 months and must re-qualify in order to continue to belong to the network. They cannot pay to belong.

Consumers can source an adviser in the network via the free Most Trusted Advisers App, which has now been approved by Apple. “The App allows consumers to in effect crowdsource an adviser they can trust. It’s a little bit like being able to talk to thousands of neighbours over the back fence about how to find an adviser they can trust.”

For advisers, the Most Trusted Advisers network formalizes client endorsement of their services. “Our message to advisers who are members and those who wish to be is – your clients trust you, now, via the Most Trusted Advisers network and app, others can too.”

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