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The Valley of Despair and the Exodus of Talent

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In my June 14 post Banker Jones and the Last Crusade: Is Wealth Management the New Holy Grail? I examined the current trend of banks seeking greener post-Dodd Frank pastures by pursuing new wealth management initiatives.

In Ocean’s 14, I’m sure they’ll call this running a reverse Willie Sutton. Sutton, of course, was the man who robbed an estimated $2 million from banks and who apocryphally explained “because that’s where the money is”.

The top 1% hold 40% of the wealth, and banks need to find new sources of earnings… What could go wrong?

Plenty.

The Valley of Despair

Change management professionals often prepare organizations for the ‘valley of despair’ that usually follows the initial excitement that bubbles up when a change is announced. Anticipation and relief from the status quo typically give way to feelings of fear, threats, guilt and depression before acceptance and progress.

Similarly, Gartner coined the the term ‘hype cycle‘ and its similar ‘trough of disillusionment’ to describe the point where emerging technologies fail to deliver on their anticipated hype. (See my post Remember When Laptops Revolutionized Financial Services?.)

I suspect that many financial institutions that are currently so excited about the potential of the affluent, high net worth and ultra-high net worth segments are currently approaching the ‘peak of inflated expectations’, unaware of the rapid downward descent that awaits them on the other side. It’s not that those segments aren’t truly attractive. It’s that most organizations won’t be able to capitalize on the opportunity.

The Exodus of Talent

Readers of this blog know that I am a big believer in leveraging innovation and technology to enhance the advice provided by advisors to clients, but I am not among those who think that a better algorithm is all we need. Wealth management has been, and remains, a talent-driven business. This peak of inflated expectations comes with an often insatiable appetite for the ‘best and brightest’ talent.

There are already signs of firms rearming for another battle in the war for talent. Job postings in the wealth space are picking up. Headhunters are brushing off their cold-calling skills and smiling and dialing again. Consultants are preparing new decks full of advice.

At its worst, the war for talent becomes a mindless bidding war, and even the unproductive dolt down the hall swaggers in to dangle an unsolicited job offer in your face, nearly daring you to match it. If you feel threatened enough, and if you have not been treating talent management as the permanent part of your job that it is, you probably will match it.

At its best though, the market brings exciting new opportunities to bear and true talent, like capital, will flow to its most efficient use. And maybe the unproductive dolt down the hall will become someone else’s shiny new unproductive dolt for 30% more pay

Why Top Talent Leaves

So how do retain your top talent (even if you do lose a few dolts along the way)? Forbes had a great post this week on Why Top Talent Leaves: Top 10 Reasons Boiled Down to 1. The punchline is:

“Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring.”

The article goes on to describe two things to do to keep your best people:

1) Create an organization where those who manage others are hired for their ability to manage well, supported  to get even better at managing, and held accountable and rewarded for doing so.

2) Then be clear about what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization – not only in terms of financial goals, but in a more three-dimensional way. What’s your purpose; what do you aspire to bring to the world? What kind of a culture do you want to create in order to do that?  What will the organization look, feel and sound like if you’re embodying that mission and culture?  How will you measure success?  And then, once you’ve clarified your hoped-for future, consistently focus on keeping that vision top of mind and working together to achieve it.

I certainly agree with both of those recommendations, but I recommend starting with the first one. In this hype cycle, we are going to see a lot of high performing individual contributors become poor performing managers. Either because they aren’t really cut out for managing others, or because their organizations won’t support them in becoming the managers they need to be.

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Banker Jones and the Last Crusade: Is Wealth Management the New Holy Grail?

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In my June 6 post 9 of 10 Banks Are Mulling an Overhaul I linked to the American Banker article that cited the findings from a KPMG study that also said:

“Forty percent of the respondents said that asset and wealth management would be essential to expand revenue over the next few years.”

But another article in the same issue of  American Banker (Missed Opportunities Abound in the Bank Channel) reported from the Prudential Wealth Management Leaders Forum in New York, which I also attended:

“…banks haven’t exploited the opportunity too well. From 2009 to 2010 banks’ and insurance broker-dealers’ assets under management shrank to $600 billion, less than 5% of the $14.5 trillion wealth management market. Meanwhile, discount brokers grew to $2.5 trillion, cornering 19% of the market. Also growing in that time were registered investment advisors, which command 13% of the market, and private banks and trust firms, which command 8%.”

Buried in papers

Is Wealth Management the New Holy Grail?

Bankers seem to be acting like Indiana Jones in his Last Crusade (…well, last until he sought the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but that’s another post… OK, probably not.) in their pursuit of the Holy Grail and its promise of immortality.

A flat (and further flattening) yield curve, low loan demand and regulatory pressures on fee income and capital needs are causing bankers to seek new avenues for growth. (See also Is Bank Merger Mania Imminent?)

It’s easy to be attracted to the net overall growth of the affluent, high net worth and ultra high net worth segments and the impending transfer of $41 trillion in wealth from the baby boomers to younger generations.

But as the American Banker article points out, there is a huge gulf between “opportunity” and “success”. Over the past thirty years, a ‘build it and they will come’ strategy worked at some level for nearly everyone. Those days are long gone and they won’t be coming back.

No Easy Fix

Firms that want to gain market share from others will need to deliver true value to clients.

At the same Prudential Wealth Management Leaders Forum, Wallace Blankenbaker of the VIP Forum described the key drivers to loyalty– serve, tailor and teach. Clients want firms that are easy to do business with, firms that look out for their best interests and firms that can help them make better decisions.

If firms fail to deliver on those key drivers, funds will continue to flow from them to competitors that can deliver.

Wealth management isn’t the Holy Grail. It’s a specific set of services designed to solve the unique issues and meet the unique goals of a specific set of clients.

As I have said before, Don’t repaint the walls when you need to fix a cracked foundation.

“You must choose, but choose wisely. For as the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.”

-The Templar Knight guarding the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

5 Tips to Find True Innovators | Inc.com

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The Keys to Hiring Effective Innovators 

1. Intellectually Restless:

Great innovators get a thrill out of defining a bold vision and then wrestling with the data, insights, barriers, and opportunities to unlock what needs to be true to get there.

2. Inspiring Rather Than Convincing:

Applicants who come from traditional consulting are often proficient at framing opportunities, yet unaccustomed to creating outcomes. We want people who can do both. Those who recognize that innovation, by its very nature, is at odds with certainty. Breakthroughs can’t be proven. They need to be envisioned and driven.

3. Proven Ability to Drive Innovation:

There’s a big difference between recognizing a great innovation and understanding how to create a great innovation. Unlike financial markets, past performance in innovation is, more often than not, an indicator of future performance.

4. Have Scaled a Peak:

We look for greatness in some aspect of an applicant’s life: successful entrepreneur, published writer, Ivy League graduate, Division I athlete, etc. The metric of success is less important than the success itself. We want people who are comfortable defining a high-order goal and then doing what it takes to accomplish it.

5. Willing to Commit to Something Bigger Than Themselves:

This is important on two levels. At a firm level, we want people who are excited by the belief that we’re on a mission to create a fundamentally new type of business. On a personal level, we want talent who believes in something that doesn’t exist today. This type of belief is the core of innovation. Therefore, we look for candidates who’ve already demonstrated their commitment to a higher-order ambition. It can be sports, religion, a philosophy, or a charity. The object of devotion is much less important than the proven willingness to invest passionately with a group of people to realize a dream.

Read the entire article here:

Hiring: 5 Tips to Find True Innovators | Inc.com.

9 of 10 Banks Are Mulling an Overhaul of Their Operating Models, KPMG Survey Finds – American Banker Article

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Soul-searching is Job 1 at a lot of banks.

That’s the takeaway from a KPMG survey of more than 100 bankers due out Wednesday.

Nine out of 10 banks said that they have re-examined, are in the process of re-examining or will re-examine their operating models, according to an advance copy of the survey results. “This means banks are rethinking everything from who their customers are to how they reach them and the products that they will offer”, said Brian Stephens, national leader of KPMG’s banking and capital markets practice.

New regulations and a struggling economy would seem to demand big changes, but banks are often accused of clinging to the past.

“It is relatively encouraging that there wasn’t a burying-their-head-in-the-sand mentality,” Stephens said.

Forty percent of the respondents said that asset and wealth management would be essential to expand revenue over the next few years.

Read the entire article here:

9 of 10 Banks Are Mulling an Overhaul of Their Operating Models, KPMG Survey Finds – American Banker Article.

Two Surefire Ways to Irritate Your Customers

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This is my shortest post ever. I have sat in numerous financial services conference sessions over the past several days as I try to contemplate all of the ways that the megatrends of  social, mobile, analytics and cloud might impact the future of the client-advisor relationship. One of the biggest things for me is to figure out is how strongly Generation Y‘s current preference for self-service will prevail as they face new life stages and increasing financial complexity in the future.

There are lots of conflicting research, opinions and predictions, and I struggle to assimilate all of the data, but I think I can safely say that either of these two methods will irritate the wealth management clients of the future as much as they do today:

  1. Force your clients into self-service options when they want someone to help them.
  2. Force your clients into getting someone to help them when they want to do it themselves.

You’re welcome. My consulting bill is in the mail.

Social and Channels and Brands, Oh My!

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Hopefully readers can forgive me if I sometimes seem a little disjointed in my writings.

I attend wealth management conferences and find myself the only person talking about digital marketing, social media and engaging clients across multiple delivery channels. Then I attend social media and financial technology events and find myself the only person talking about wealth management, at least in terms of the kind that involves financial advisors actually helping clients.

Then I read, as I have referenced before, Ron Shevlin‘s BS-busting work on his blog Snarketing 2.0 and he skewers the very notion that some of this stuff even matters:

And so what if banks do create a “consistent brand experience across all channels”? Do you think bank customers will be lulled into forgetting the other issues and problems with their <sic> that they face?

He is right, of course. But I’ll come back to that.

Last week I sat in a room in New York full of bright wealth management executives to discuss important ways that firms can improve client service and grow their businesses. Booz & Company showed research that wealth management was one of the bright spots (along with payments) for growth in a sluggish financial industry. Their research showed an expected growth in the wealth management business of 3x GNP growth. That sounds pretty good until you realize that GNP growth has averaged about 1.5% over the past ten quarters.

Voice of the client largely missing

There were lots of good discussions on lots of relevant topics, but what struck me the most was how internally focused our industry has become. Maybe we have always been this way. Aside from my friends at the VIP Forum and WISE Gateway, most of the discussion was about the firms, their people, the investment strategies and the sales and marketing, rather than the clients themselves.

I can’t count the number of surveys and studies that show the increasing expectations of integrated mobile and web offerings, and the affluent have higher adoption rates than the general population. Yet someone in the room actually said out loud that they haven’t done anything with mobile technology because their clients haven’t been asking for it.

Henry Ford famously said (or perhaps never said, according to Patrick Vlaskovits in the Harvard Business Review) “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Whether he said it or not, the apocryphal quote highlights both sides of the same coin for me.

Listen to your clients. But also use your own intuition to design something to solve their problems in a better, faster or cleaner way. That is the essence of innovation, and what is too often lacking in financial services. (See Five Things Banks Can Learn from Start-Ups.)

Don’t repaint when you need to fix a cracked foundation

Which brings me back to Ron Shevlin’s comments. In my mind, it’s not that financial firms shouldn’t strive to “create a consistent brand experience across all channels” (or engage in social media, or build their brand), it’s that too many firms are focused on the window dressing instead of addressing  the core issues that consumers want us to address. Shevlin’s closing comments are spot on:

If, however, the focus was on “fixing problems” or “redesigning” processes and interactions, then maybe funds would flow to the places where they’re really needed.

But you’re not going to effectively prioritize those investment alternatives by asking consumers about their channel preferences.

I am now in Boston and off to another conference, surely filled with bright people. Let’s see who’s really focused on the clients…

More here next week.

Five Things Banks Can Learn From Start-Ups

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Most bankers don’t spend a lot of time with start-up companies. The need for bankers’ loan decisions to be right 99% of the time tends to not  mix well with most start-ups’ risky and voracious appetite for capital.

Outside of a few bankers in Seattle, Silicon Valley and a few other places, the clear exception is the banking innovation and financial technology (fintech) communities. We all get together at great conferences like Banking Innovation and Finovate, and I always learn from bankers, large vendors and entrepreneurs alike.

The best start-ups have lessons that a lot of bankers would do well to learn:

1. Start with the customer

Start-ups that take off and grow are usually designed around a specific set of customers, whose needs and preferences are deeply understood. Most banks want to be all things to all people, so they end up being nothing much to far too many. Of course, there are some interesting exceptions. For some really thought-provoking ideas read about niche banking from Tribed, whose CEO Jeff Stephens I had the pleasure of meeting at a recent conference.

2. Know your value proposition

Great start-ups understand what problems they solve for their customers. They know their pain points how their solutions add value. Many banks are still oriented around selling products that may or may not solve any specific problems. Worse, customers have an even harder time perceiving value from the myriad of add-on fees that too often are not linked to any value-creating activities.

3. Iterate regularly

By their very nature, start-ups that survive and thrive stay close to their customers and make regular iterations of their offerings to better tailor it to what their customers want (and not necessarily what they say they want). While bank customers don’t want change simply for change’s sake, well-considered tweaks for well-defined reasons increase satisfaction and loyalty.

4. Keep it lean

I worked many years for a CEO whose simple mantra was “grow revenue faster than expenses and great things happen”. My review so far of banks’ 1Q earnings shows a continuation of a fair number of banks growing expenses faster than revenue, some of them with efficiency ratios (non-interest expense as a percent of revenues) in excess of 65-70% and even higher. This is not sustainable. If the revenue challenges cannot be met, expenses will have to be cut to maintain EPS growth. Otherwise, merger mania may indeed by imminent, as I have previously posted.

In the start-up world, the dot com boom rally cry of “get big fast” has largely been replaced by lean and mean infrastructures. Instagram– which just sold itself to Facebook for a a billion dollars– has barely a dozen employees.

5. Protect your capital

Entrepreneurs know that capital is precious and they have to allocate it wisely. Signing that expensive lease on a fancy new office suite may mean that you can’t make that critical server upgrade or hire that new business development manager.

Bankers should know that capital is precious too, but I see evidence to the contrary so often that I wonder sometimes. The financial meltdown revealed huge leverage ratios and loan books filled with poorly underwritten loans that quickly depleted capital reserves.

Today’s slow growing environment is causing bankers to be tempted to forget this lesson in the quest for loan growth. Which is why I always say that bankers need to think like private fixed income investors.

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Are you a coach… or just a caddie?

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Last week I had the chance to collaborate with some great minds in management and leadership at a leadership conference for the firm that pays me for my day job.

I have been a “Strengths Geek” for several years, as I often note, so I was excited to work with Paul Berg and Diane Obrist from Gallup as they led 130+ wealth management leaders through their StrengthsFinder results.

I have also long been a fan of the work of Tim Freeman from Efficient Marketing, so I was happy to finally meet with him in person. I also discovered a great new source of thought leadership in Kristie Van Leeuwen from The The Next Stage Group, LLC.

The closing keynote speech was from General Stephen Lorenz, USAF (retired), CEO of the United States Air Force Academy Endowment.

A senior leader is responsible for self, people and results.

— General Stephen Lorenz

It was a great blend of leadership and management. A mix of doing the right things, and doing things right, as Peter Drucker would put it.

But my takeaway headline was actually from my colleague Jerry, who said something to the effect of:

You know, I’ve always thought of myself as a coach, but if I’m honest with myself, I’ve really just been a caddie. I know the course, and I know which clubs to use, but I’ve really been letting the players play their own games when I should be helping them get better.

Jerry is brilliant, successful, frenetic and sometimes prone to pontificating as he thinks aloud, but he is consistently sincere in trying to make himself and his team better.

He captured in a well-turned phrase the thread running through it all, and something I have seen a lot– the mistaken notion that a good manager simply  ‘hires good people and stays out of the way’.

In my experience, managers who cite that as their overarching principle often aren’t that good at hiring, and ‘staying out of the way’ is usually an excuse for not holding people accountable.

…there’s an enormous difference between leading an organization and presiding over it. The leader who boasts of her hands-off style or puts her faith in empowerment is not dealing with the issues of the day. She is not confronting the people responsible for poor performance, or searching for problems to solve and then making sure they get solved. She is presiding, and she’s only doing half her job.

— Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, Execution, The Discipline of Getting Things Done

This is not to advocate micromanagement, no one likes to be micromanaged. But great coaches hold their players accountable. More importantly, they cultivate teams of people who want to win and a culture of continuous improvement.

Great players seek coaching because they want to get better.

Are you a coach… or just a caddie?