Using Data to analyse the benefits of working with an adviser
At the beginning of the year, I was invited to take part in the PFS roadshows. Over the course of the meetings, people often asked why I decided to set up EDVOA, the suite of online tools that helps advisers have conversations with their clients about the value of advice.
I started working in financial services over 20 years ago. I quickly found that helping financial advisers was a passion of mine and that has remained undimmed by the passage of time.
I’ve been fortunate enough to witness the impact advice can have on clients’ lives. It was my early experiences with clients that taught me the importance of engaging them in understanding more about their investments.
So, I’ve always sought opportunities to provide tools for advisers to educate clients. I’ve done that with the different businesses I’ve worked for but there came a point for me where it became significant enough to be more than a by-product of my job.
One of the catalysts for doing more was reading the Adviser’s Alpha paper published a couple of years ago by Vanguard. It was the trigger for me to carry out further research, reading many other studies that have been published on the topic.
I absorbed all this information, but it became clear to me that their message in these papers, and the facts they were presenting, needed animating in order to help people better understand the value of advice. They needed to be brought to life and personalised to individual circumstances. I wanted to show the effect of advice over time, not just the single annualised figure (around 3% in the Vanguard study).
EDVOA is my outlet for this, and desire to educate clients on the value of advice. EDVOA stands for Education and Demonstration of the Value Of Advice.
With the EDVOA, I have sought to collate the information from four of the published papers and deliver tools that bring the value of advice to life using specific data and compounding the value of advice.
My ultimate aim is to help advisers help clients understand the value of we all know an adviser delivers by showing them the evidence – the data. They can then decide whether the advice they are receiving is worth the fee – making evidence based adviser decisions.
If you’d like to give EDVOA a go and start educating your clients on the value of advice, try EDVOA for free for 14 days.
