Jason Bernic

"When last did someone here take a position that would be difficult to defend if it went wrong?" That's a question worth asking but every advisor and every business seems to steer clear of it. Look across the industry and the portfolios begin to resemble one another. The same managers appear, the same funds, the same fee hurdles, the same allocations arrived at by the same reasoning. It is usually described as best practice but we suspect that it is largely something else. An advisor who does...

Ask almost any financial planning business what its growth plans are and wealthier clients will feature somewhere in the answer. Ask who is responsible for that happening and the answer is nearly always the advisors, which is where the trouble starts. Growth in this industry is usually counted rather than examined. More clients, more advisors, more assets under management. A business serving a thousand clients, versus a business serving two hundred clients, can turn the same annual income,...

There is a particular way the financial planning industry talks about its own difficulties, and it involves taking them one at a time. Consolidation occupies one conversation. Technology occupies another. Transformation occupies a third, generally shorter and more uncomfortable than either. Each is treated as a discrete problem with its own timeline, its own commentary and its own set of responses. Read together, they describe something considerably more coherent: a single situation arriving...