How to be a fully remote financial advisor
Remember the good old days when you daydreamed of being able to work from your home? Having a leisurely breakfast and not having to commute to work. Then starting work on your couch, in your pajamas, a king in your own castle.
Well, chances are you’ve just discovered that working from home is not the picnic you had imagined it to be. Especially when there is a pandemic out there and you have to deal with people worrying about their hard-earned money, markets crashing and general chaos. All that while also having to comply with several strict compliance regulations.
As a remote worker, happily working from home for the past eight years and the CCO of a fully distributed Wealth Management company, I’m here to tell you: it can be done.
Create a comfortable, efficient workspace in your home
Before you start worrying about emails and tasks piling up, make sure you have a comfortable space to work from. You will soon find out that your couch is definitely not a good idea, as it will not only make you drowsy, your shoulders will probably also start aching real bad, real soon. We don’t know how long the COVID-19 crisis will last, so you need to figure out a long term solution. Your home workspace needs to provide you with good posture (trust me) and distraction-free surroundings, as much as possible. Not the TV, not the fridge.
So, set up your desk and make sure you have a stable, private internet connection. If you have a work laptop, double check that all the applications and services you need are installed, enabled, and up to date. If you don’t, then take note of all the apps you use at work and contact your IT department for instructions on how to install and securely access them from your home computer, securely being the operative word here.
Which brings me to my next point.
Cybersecurity and compliance remain paramount
When it comes to investments, compliance is paramount, even under crazy circumstances like a pandemic. Now, the SEC has recently issued a response to COVID-19 and the related effects on securities markets in order to lighten the burden. However, you still need to be vigilant about record keeping, financial reporting, privacy, and data security.
So, before you access any sensitive data and PII, contact your firm’s IT department for guidance on how to connect to the firm’s VPN (if available) and how to enable multi-factor authentication on any other services you use that offer access to sensitive data.
If you work independently, it is a good idea to enable multi-factor authentication wherever possible (e.g. on your email account, your broker account etc). As for using a VPN, there are several free VPN services available on the Internet. Tunnelbear is a great option among them.
Refrain from printing any document that contains private client information or sending out emails containing private information. If you have roommates, make sure your computer locks automatically after being idle for a few minutes, set up a complex password to unlock your computer, and don’t leave it on in plain sight. Your screen should not be visible by other people.
Establish regular communication with your team
The biggest issue people have with working remotely is the lack of direct communication with the rest of the team. If you were one of those people, fear no longer, Slack is here to save the day. Free to use, extremely user-friendly, and available on both iOS and Android devices, Slack offers the best chat and file-sharing service out there, with voice and video calling available to top it off.
And of course, let’s not forget about the absolute core of remote communication, Google. Apart from my Gmail, hardly a day goes by when I don’t take advantage of Google Calendar and Meet to sync with my co-workers via scheduled or impromptu video conferences.
Establish regular communication with your clients
Contact your clients to let them know how they can reach out to you and what they can expect from you in the near future.
With the general feeling of uncertainty everyone is experiencing these days, managing your clients’ expectations and keeping them up to date and reassured can make all the difference between a lost and a loyal client.
Our CEO at AgentRisk has set up a Calendly account and had shared it with our clients, so that they can easily schedule a call with him without the back-and-forth emails. We have also setup a YouTube channel where we schedule webinars that can help our clients make better decisions about their clients’ investments.
Alternatively, you can use Zoom, another great service for hosting webinars or scheduling phone or video conferences.
Highlight the importance of making data-driven decisions
In times of crisis people tend to make emotional decisions and that is almost always a bad idea, especially when it comes to finances. Show your clients that fear, anxiety and a feeling of helplessness are not their allies during this critical period by highlighting the importance of data.
Of course, financial discussions take time. We highly recommend using a service to automate portfolio management, so you can make more time to have 1–on–1 meetings with your clients and help them navigate them through these difficult times.
Overlay is our new innovative product that helps you manage your clients’ portfolios automatically AND boost your communication at the same time. And to help out during this crisis, we’ve made Overlay Premium completely free for 6 months, no strings attached.
Stay Safe and Stay Positive
When it all becomes too much and you just need a break, join the WFH group on Slack. After all, it’s happy hour somewhere and this way you can socialize and have some much-needed fun while staying safe for yourself, your loved ones and your clients.
At AgentRisk, we build investment products and tools for individuals as well as for financial advisors and wealth managers, leveraging state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms and time-tested investment theories.
