Turn your business resolutions into habits that stick

I find that the idea of making resolutions tends to be divisive; you’re either for them or against them. For me, it’s all about the intention — the act of a turning a resolution into a habit.

In that spirit, we recently published our viewpoint on 10 resolutions for wealth and asset managers in 2024 – areas executives should evaluate as they refine and execute strategies for sustainable, long-term growth.

These 10 resolutions in many respects have some common “threads” — that is, three cross-cutting themes that I often find myself talking about:

• The first is inclusion and access, whether that’s greater opportunity for access to insights and advice, financial or otherwise, or an enhanced ability to be part of the process rather than only following.
• ?The second is education, in the broadest sense; educating advisors and clients alike in the full range of options that are available – private markets, tax loss harvesting, direct indexing – and the benefits aligned to outcomes.
• ?And the third is trying to make information easier to understand and digest. That cuts across financial advice in general and applies in particular to the ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to support advisors. I also firmly believe in embracing new technologies like AI early, even if it doesn’t feel comfortable – something I wrote about just a few months ago. It’s better to take the initiative to educate yourself and gain an understanding of AI, so that you’re not left behind.

Taking all these themes together, we’re talking about creating a broader audience for wealth and asset management organizations – and, crucially, an audience with a greater understanding of their options for managing their financial wellbeing. It’s the difference between telling someone what to do and teaching them how, and why, to do it.

With that, there are three specific resolutions that I would like to highlight:

• Co-developing financial plans with clients
• Broadening investor access and inclusion
• Using AI intelligently

1. Why co-creation works

The importance of this is encapsulated in leaders resolving to develop holistic and well-integrated offerings, and doing this through greater client involvement and co-creation. That’s crucial if you want to energize people to get involved in proactively managing their finances.

When we published our 2023 Global Wealth Research Report last April, we highlighted that there was a direct correlation between clients’ level of involvement in the process and their satisfaction with it – particularly in times of uncertainty. That is, greater involvement led to greater confidence which led to less movement of clients from one advisor to another (i.e., greater retention).

Of course, co-creation takes more time upfront – but if you do it, the odds are that your clients will stick with you. And the bottom line is that the cost to retain an existing client is significantly less than the cost to acquire a new one.

2. Evolution of talent … to support inclusion

I’ve been thinking a lot about planning for the future from a personal standpoint because my oldest son has recently joined the professional world, so we’ve had many conversations about the benefits of engaging with a financial advisor.

In speaking with my own financial advisor, who’s from the same generation as I am, we discussed how bringing on advisors who are from newer generations has been successful. It’s more comfortable to have those financial discussions with someone who you can relate to than it is to have someone who looks like one of your parents sit down and start a conversation with you. Again, it’s all about making financial advice more relatable, and instilling good habits early in a young person’s career. At the same time, it is about the evolution of the workforce at financial institutions, upskilling and re-skilling talent to work with new client segments, and catering to the needs of younger, informed and digitally savvy investors coming into the mix.

3. Creating confidence in AI

As for AI, we know that has a multifaceted role to play. For example, it can drastically enhance efficient personalization. For example, using AI’s cognitive capabilities as part of the advisory process is a good way of serving a larger number of clients in a more customized way, at speed yet cost-effectively.

One of the challenges with AI is that many are questioning what will happen to their personal data when they share it and it’s used in this way. It’s important to give clients confidence that this won’t be an issue, because if they want personalized advice, and they want it fast, they have to be confident and willing to allow their financial advisor to leverage technology and their data. It’s about creating a virtuous circle: “You trust us with your information and we’ll use this cutting-edge tech to give you personalized insights.”

Making resolutions stick

Of course, we all know the problem with New Year’s resolutions. We start January with the best of intentions, and then we lose momentum (or motivation) and return to what we were doing before.

The key to making resolutions stick is to turn them into habits. It's about intentionality. You have to constantly go back and reinforce and re-remind yourself that this is what needs to be done.

I have personal experience of this through something I started doing a few years ago around fitness and wellbeing. Basically, I team up with three or four other colleagues in January; the goal is to score points (as a team) based on your daily exercise or activity commitments. I committed to doing 30 minutes of exercise every day and the other team members made similar commitments. It all works on the honor system where you report your own progress, but the key thing is that you’re part of a team. Your team doesn’t get their “point”, unless everyone follows through on their commitment. Just the other day, which was an early start and a late finish including a flight, I ensured I walked for 30 minutes at the airport, while waiting for my flight. It did result in some inquisitive looks by several whom I passed nine or 10 times as I looped around the terminal, but I was committed to fulfill my part to get my team its point. ??

Small steps

As a leader, you may be looking at our resolutions and thinking, “We can’t do all of that – we just don’t have the resources.”

I would say, break up a larger resolution into smaller chunks that are each achievable in themselves, one at a time. Ask yourself: What are the micro-actions we can take that will form better habits that will help us progress toward our end goal?

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The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.