Roy Keenan from Yarra Capital Management shares insights with James Dunn from The Inside Network on the role of active management. The Inside Adviser
After the Hayne Royal Commission many advisers decided to steer away from large dealer groups in favour of becoming self-licensed. In the last six months, however, that trend has taken an abrupt turn.
Eleece Quilliam discusses the power of communication
If the financial advice industry needed a passionate advocate, it only has to call on Eleece Quilliam. The National Manager of Invesco Consulting in Australia is impressively adamant in her belief in the importance of advice.
“I love working with advisers, because I genuinely believe that what they do is up there with the likes of doctors and nurses, and all the people that do good for the community,” says Quilliam. “As an industry, we have had to deal with the fact that a small number of people, and organisations, did the wrong things, and given all advisers a bad name, and that makes me very sad, personally, because I know how important advisers are to the wellbeing of Australians.”
As the Australian head of Invesco Consulting, Quilliam eats, sleeps and breathes helping advisers to be better at what they do. Invesco Consulting is an advisery practice development arm of Invesco that builds programs – primarily communications-based – to help advisers, in a nutshell, communicate better with their clients.
Invesco Consulting also works with advisers to become more adept at meeting the needs and wants of their clients, improve the operation of their practices and marketing efforts, and increase their ability to find new clients – but communication is at the heart of the offering.
“What we do is mainly based on the power of language: talking about what language we should be using with clients, and how to communicate in a way that they understand,” says Quilliam. “Language plays an absolutely vital role in effectively communicating an adviser’s value to current and potential clients.
“You can be the best adviser in terms of your knowledge set, and how you actually interpret and understand strategy, and you can represent a firm with access to the very best investment products, but if you can’t sit in front of a client and influence that client to trust you with their livelihood – then you don’t have a business, you don’t have clients, you don’t have anything,” says Quilliam. “How you attain that ability to influence comes from how you communicate.”
Invesco Consulting’s programs work on the language that advisers should be using with clients, and how to communicate in a way that clients understand, she says. The programs provide valuable information on which common words and terms advisers should avoid, what they should replace them with, and even how to frame their language depending on genders and generations.
“Invesco Consulting has been working to understand the language of value and cost, and their intrinsic link in financial advice, for more than two decades,” Quilliam says. “We know how the human brain works, we know how memory works. Some words just trigger such a negative response – a great example is ‘fees.’ People hate the word. Simply replacing it with ‘cost’ has a completely different effect on your client’s receptors, and that completely changes the conversation. It can be as simple as this, or it can be as profound as really understanding how to end-up with clients that trust you to help them with more than money, and to help them feel secure and confident in their future.”
The insight into language and how it is received also informs how the programs are delivered. “We really focused on making our content not just educational, but entertaining,” says Quilliam. “You’re more likely to remember something if it was engaging and fun to do so, we focus very heavily on that in our programs.”
Ultimately, the Invesco Consulting offering sits outside the firm’s investment capability. “I work very closely with the sales team, but I don’t sit in sales per se. I work exceptionally closely with the marketing team, but I don’t work in marketing. We are definitely a brand augmentation tool. We know that Australian advisers don’t necessarily know too much on the whole about Invesco, it’s not a hugely recognizable brand – the Invesco Consulting offering is there so that advisers start to recognize not just who we are, but the good that we actually can provide them in the marketplace.”
It is certainly a hand-in-glove fit with Quilliam, who came into the wealth industry via a degree in finance and arts, and a graduate position in NAB/MLC. “I was working in lots of different divisions, of banking, financial advice, and I got involved at MLC with mapping out the client experience and working with some new products. That tapped-into my background – I had studied psychology as well as international relations, in my Arts degree.”
Then, she joined Invesco. “Virtually as soon as I arrived at Invesco, they said, ‘given your background and your interest, and how you approach the market, we think you’d be really well-suited to leading the roll-out of this new concept into the Australian market.’ I immediately saw so much potential in the Invesco Consulting content and in the way that the programs were structured and the research was carried out that I just jumped at the opportunity. And here we are now,” says Quilliam.
