Investment sales leader sees the pressure advisors face to deliver, explains what execution is looking like now
It’s Sal Ammirato job to understand advisors’ day to day. The VP and Head of Retail Distribution & Channel Strategy at Sun Life Global Investments. has to be close to advisors to be successful. He and his sales team need to connect with dealer head offices and with individual advisory practices, finding out what advisors want to achieve, what they’re struggling with, and how SLGI’s sales team can offer products of services that help those advisors. Increasingly, he’s hearing that the expectation on advisors to deliver some form of “holistic wealth management,” is creating a new demand for simplicity, a focus on solving for details, and forcing advisors and their wholesalers to think more about creating capacity.
Ammirato explained that while the call from clients and dealer leadership is to deliver holistic wealth plans encompassing individuals’ and families’ whole lives, the execution of those big picture goals comes down to very specific details. Executing on those details takes time and capacity from advisors. Ammirato explained how he helps support advisors to ensure they have the capacity to meet these new expectations.
“Advisors are really being asked to do more. More planning, more communication, more transparency,” Ammirato says. “Whether it’s market uncertainty or periods of underperformance that we’re seeing, advisors are continually telling us that they need help. Not just with information, because everyone does a really good job in the industry of being clinical and the delivery of stats, but they want support on how to communicate that information effectively with their clients.”
Ammirato says that 100 per cent of the advisors he speaks to see the value in a holistic approach. He notes, though, that the industry has tended to overuse the word and extend its meaning. Dealer head offices, asset managers, and individual advisors are all struggling to define exactly what holistic wealth management means and how to deliver on it successfully. He says, though, that delivering on every detail of a client’s financial life is key. Using periods of volatility as an example, Ammirato says that advisors now want to make sure that the portfolio is protected, that tax is factored in, that financial plans remain intact, and that estate plans are unaffected. All of that requires partnership. Ammirato has seen advisors connect best with asset managers and dealers that recognize the sheer volume of details they have to watch for now.
Looking after all those details for clients takes a huge amount of advisors’ capacity, and Ammirato believes they need more.
“A lot of the advisors that we’re speaking to today are operating at full capacity already. And then we throw in the complexity of the industry that we’re seeing over the last number of years, regulatory reform, product proliferation, and then the amount of information they’re expected to process,” Ammirato says. “Then there’s a hundred different asset managers, and they’re all sharing their opinion, their thought leadership with advisors. The advisor has to be able to retain that and move. The challenge is really execution, and that’s where we’re seeing a lot of advisors beginning to need that extra support.”
Ammirato’s view is that advisors don’t need that support to come in the form of more data. Instead, they need insights that they can use in conversation with their clients. Ammirato notes that plenty of asset managers focus on trying to impress advisors with the volume or complexity of their information. Sounding intelligent may feel good in the moment, but it may not help advisors achieve what they want for their clients. Ammirato prefers to present information in the context of an advisor’s practice, their behavioural coaching goals for clients, and their management of client expectations.
Simplicity is what Ammirato wants from his team of wholesalers. He believes that there is too much noise in the world and there are too many products in the industry. If wholesalers can simplify the investment story and make it easier for advisors to communicate that story to their clients, then they can offer a degree of capacity back to those advisors.
For wholesalers, achieving that simplicity requires discipline. Ammirato notes that if a meeting with an advisor is just about discussing product, then keeping things short and impactful is ideal. On a larger scale, though, he says he is working to coach his sales team into trusted partners for advisors, helping them to understand advisors’ businesses and provide clear support where advisors need them, offering specialists for specific scenarios.
“Trusted partnership means articulating our thought leadership in a clear and concise way. It means building out practice management teams, whether it’s through our tax and estate team or it’s with our Sun Life Consulting Group that helps advisors grow their practice. It means leveraging our newly created portfolio construction investment solutions team… what we’ve done as an organization is provided that consistency to help advisors understand our philosophy, our process. It helps them then build the confidence with us and reduces complexity over time.”
