Banks looking to increase their investment revenue could do better by focusing on reducing the size of advisors’ territories and hiring more financial advisors, according to PrimeVest’s latest white paper on “growing investment programs.”
According to Catherine Bonneau, president and CEO of PrimeVest, in an interview with OnWallSteet’s Margarida Correla,
The research called out the fact that across the industry there’s room for improvement and an ideal coverage ratio per advisor is 7, 762 households; which is almost half the industry average
In other words, banks and credit unions need almost twice the number of their current financial advisors to maximize their revenue.
So how do the current advisors see this? Well, new financial advisors are often viewed as rivals and a threat to reducing their territories and consequently their opportunity of increasing their own revenues. But PrimVest says this is not necessarily true and that over time advisors will see the merits of cutting back their territories.
Advantages include having more time to spend with clients; less time traveling between branches and more time to build rapport with the staff in their branches, all of which leads to more referrals for the bank. The report is titled “Optimizing the Advisor-to-Client Ratio.”