As Boomers start moving into retirement, a huge pool of money is “in motion,” reports a study by Pershing LLC, and those financial advisors who manage to “capture the retirement relationship” with investment clients stand to gain 50% more of those clients’ wallets.
Robert Cirrotti, director in product management and development at Pershing, a unit of BNY Mellon, says that the current amount of “money in motion” is about $300 billion a year, a figure he said is growing steadily as more and more Baby Boomers start to leave the workforce and prepare for their retirement years.
This money is in the form of IRAs, Rollover IRAs, Roth conversions, small business employer plans, as well as a considerable amount of taxable accounts that are earmarked by investors for retirement. “We have found that people don’t just expect to rely on their tax-deferred savings,” says Cirrotti. “Many have other liquid investments that they have been intending to use for retirement too.”
The $300-billion figure doesn’t include non-liquid assets such as real estate, though many of the people in the generation nearing retirement, their children grown, have larger homes that they intend to sell as they downsize, freeing up more funds for retirement.
The Pershing study, Cirrotti says, shows that that the key to winning a bigger share of clients’ retirement investment business is developing a relationship that makes the adviser the primary retirement provider. He says there are a number of key drivers that can make this happen.
The first thing, he says, is transactional accounts. “If you handle a client’s cash management accounts, it creates an ongoing relationship with the client,” he says.
Secondly, he notes that in the wake of the market crisis and amid continued market volatility, today’s new retirees and potential retirees “want to see, more and more, the downside risks of any investment strategies.” Cirrotti says advisors can build trust by doing a good job of laying out any such risks clearly.
Finally he says that those advisors who “finalize in writing” a retirement plan for a client can often end up getting even more of the client’s total investments--as much as 75%. “As you become ‘The Guy’ for a client,” he explains, “the thing that naturally comes up is that the client will say, ‘Oh, I have this other investment somewhere else,” or with a certain broker, and that becomes an opportunity to consolidate those assets with the rest of the money that you are managing.”
Cirrotti says that while the findings of the Pershing study apply to advisers in all channels, they show that there is a prime opportunity for bank-based advisors to pull in brokerage money this way.
He adds that Pershing has developed an
