Understanding What Investors Value in Advisors

As the industry evolves, so do the expectations of investors. It’s crucial to understand what clients want from their financial advisors—and demonstrate how you can offer that value.

By knowing investors’ top priorities, you can strengthen client relationships, build trust, and improve your practice. Morningstar analysts take a closer look at our new data along with past studies—including why clients hire a financial advisor and keep a financial advisor—and identify common themes for what matters to investors.

To read the full research report, download a copy.

Investors care about having access to reliable advice. But this discovery may go deeper than respecting an advisor’s expertise. Investors value how they benefit from that expertise—both in terms of the quality of advice and how it makes them feel. Overall, they’re looking for an advisor who they can trust and who has the expertise to handle financial matters.

What can advisors do? Showing your work can help build that much-needed trust. Another important facet to this is ensuring clients understand your adherence to a best-interest standard. When clients know the relationship between the advice they receive and how you get paid, they may be more likely to accept your recommendation.

Advisor Workstation’s portfolio analytics lets you show clients how market conditions, life changes, and other factors can affect their investing journey. Additionally, our risk profiling and risk scoring tools make it easy to share client-friendly reports on their personal risk tolerance to better support investors.

To start, investors want an advisor who will work with them to identify their deeper financial goals. This means investors recognize, at least on some level, that they don’t always know what they want to achieve. Investors also appreciate the support advisors provide throughout the process—from identifying their goals to bringing them peace of mind that they’re on track.

What can advisors do? Not only do investors want to achieve their goals, but they also want guidance. Although complete assurance isn’t possible, investors still benefit from knowing they have an advisor who’s looking out for their financial future.

The investment planning experience within Advisor Workstation allows you to build proposals and portfolios that fit your clients’ unique goals. You can simplify the planning process with profiling tools that drive deeper conversations and boost client engagement.

Advisors who provide behavioral coaching are also critical to clients. This may not be surprising as the role of advisors continues to evolve into one of a financial coach or even financial guru. Plus, our past research finds clients continue to work with their financial advisors for more emotional reasons than financial ones.

What can advisors do? Investors may not want to admit to making behavioral mistakes, so advisors must be subtle to avoid alienating clients. One way to do this is by providing examples of behavioral coaching in action, like becoming a sounding board for an investor. An advisor may see this as an opportunity to communicate and help clients avoid mistakes, but investors may see it through the positive lens of getting an expert’s opinion.

Morningstar for Advisors mobile app, the companion app for Advisor Workstation, is an effective way to stay connected to clients. The app allows you to streamline communication and show your meaningful advice with custom reports, data points, and analytics.

Although returns may be attention-grabbing, they’re not seen as the main value-add of advisors. However, advisors might hear about returns because it can be easier—and considered less embarrassing—for clients to talk about this topic rather than the emotions they experience when they see volatility.

What can advisors do? While returns aren’t the main value, they’re still part of the conversation. Setting expectations can be one solution—giving clients a benchmark against which to measure returns may prepare them for the ups and downs that are inherent in investing. Another approach is having clients check their portfolio less often, as this will help naturally smooth out the peaks and valleys of the market.

Delivering FINRA-reviewed reports within Advisor Workstation can help you manage client expectations and emotions around complex investment decisions. The platform has client-ready report templates, so you can conveniently present your great recommendations.

Every investor has different priorities—which is why advisors must be ready to think more about goals and personalization, all the while acting as a guiding hand for investors. When you know what investors want, you can stand out from the competition and meet clients’ changing needs.

Morningstar’s Advisor Workstation lets advisors show the power of their advice and build trust. From investing planning to managing portfolios, the all-in-one platform gives you the tools and resources you need to streamline your workflows and strengthen client relationships.

Request a free trial today.