★ What’s Your Investment Philosophy?
Do you have one? Are you familiar with the concept?
An investment philosophy IS NOT a granular, quantitative description of top 10 holdings and research details. It doesn’t require several pages of explanation.
An investment philosophy IS a high-level description of your discipline and belief structure about managing your clients’ assets. Like an elevator speech, it should be clear, concise, and easily communicated to the average person (in mostly layman’s terms).
An investment philosophy is intended to work cohesively alongside the rest of your marketing and messaging. Ultimately its main purpose is to help your prospects and clients understand that you have a strong, consistent discipline about investing.
No matter what your view or opinion of how you manage assets for your clients, we believe it’s crucial that you’re able to clearly articulate your investment philosophy to prospects and clients. Even when it doesn’t take center stage, it’s still a fundamental piece of the story you tell.
The FocusPoint team walks alongside advisors to help them define and communicate their investment philosophy.
★ What’s an Investment Policy Committee (IPC)?
An IPC is a group of investment-focused professionals who work collaboratively to make/recommend all strategic investment decisions involving clients’ portfolios. It exists to uphold and execute a firm’s investment philosophy.
While the idea of having an IPC makes so much sense for many advisors, in reality, it’s usually too cost-prohibitive.
This is why we’ve built one into our solution. Advisors who want to outsource this responsibility—while maintaining control over their client experience—have the option to utilize an IPC through FocusPoint.
Why Do I Need an IPC?
Here are some benefits of having your own IPC:
• COMMUNICATION
Advisors who utilize our IPC have direct access to—and regular communication from—their very own investment management team.
In a perfect world, most advisors wouldn’t be spending lots of time on investment research. They’d be doing what they enjoy most and do best: meeting with clients and/or gathering assets.
While we are agnostic about how advisors manage their clients’ assets, our solution includes the option for advisors to plug into their very own investment team. This CFA-led IPC constantly reviews the investments within each of several portfolio series (white-labeled for each advisor) and communicates insight on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to all advisors.
A steady communication stream from the IPC allows our advisors to make informed decisions – yet spend only a handful of hours each month on portfolio management.
• DOCUMENTATION
We provide advisors with documented rationale for each and every investment recommendation.
Each time a portfolio trade, change or rebalance is recommended, your IPC provides you with documented justification for the recommendation. Not only does this unique system give you the ability to speak knowledgeably to your clients about any changes within their portfolios, but it can also be greatly beneficial to you from a compliance and records standpoint.
In summary, advisors who choose FocusPoint can private label their own clear, concise investment philosophy to design model portfolios that accommodate the vast majority of their clients’ needs.
Concurrently, they’re utilizing the expertise of a trusted portfolio management team who makes ongoing recommendations, keeping them apprised of what they need to know in order to make—and document—solid, informed decisions for their clients.
Advisors who take advantage of our IPC (as an extension of their own team) are able to speak knowledgeably to clients about their portfolios, yet they’re spending a limited amount of their valuable time on the investments themselves…it’s a simple, unique solution that we think just makes sense.
Free up more of your time while providing a more streamlined, enhanced experience to your clients.
Don’t just take our word for it. Click here to read a detailed case study about one of our sole practitioner advisors. He was able to significantly grow his business by fully embracing access to his very own IPC through FocusPoint.