Utilizing Paraplanner Support – A Tactical Advantage for Advisors

As a result of today’s volatile markets, client anxiety over retirement planning seems to be rising. In response, many larger firms are creating their own Paraplanning departments to help Financial Advisors create plans for their clients. Other firms may simply lack the resources or willingness to implement a similar service during a time when clients need guidance. Having Paraplanning support, whether provided internally or by an outsourced team of experts provides advisors with several opportunities to:

• Quickly address client concerns
• Significantly grow their business
• Reduce time spent onboarding new clients
• Reduce time spent developing or revising retirement and investment plans
• Evaluate whether their financial planning software has the scalability and efficiency to keep them ahead in a competitive market

Financial planning software is an important component of client satisfaction and retention. It can also be complex. As advisors field client questions and concerns, they must build and re-align client-specific financial plans, a process which includes:

• Gathering and organizing all the data received from the client needed to build or modify a plan
• Integrating client information from other software vendors at account transfer
• Examining plan assumptions within the software and inputting the information into the application
• Risk Management (including Life Insurance, Disability and Long-Term care) analysis
• Social Security Optimization, including identifying which strategy pays the most and which strategy is the best for the client’s plan
• Building out recommendations using scenarios and what-ifs

Advisors must also be able to spend time with their clients to be sure they understand their needs, goals, and expectations.  

In such a demanding and increasingly competitive market, advisors may feel like they are swimming upstream with all the pieces they have to manage. If your firm does not have the budget or resources available to implement an in-house Paraplanning department, there are experts available to help your advisors be more efficient by spending more time with their clients, rather than struggling with back-office issues and data entry. The right outsourcing partner can also provide more details around data gathering, goal setting, social security projections and investment data entry, defining goals as well as risk identification concerning insurance, disability and estate planning.

Oyster has the experience and capabilities to assist with the plan-building process, or mentoring, as firm’s move towards a greater focus on Financial Planning.