Amity Investment Solutions (Pty) Ltd News

The regulatory concept of KYC is defined as a standard used in the investment and financial services industries. It is often defined as a way to verify customers and know their risk and financial profiles.

In the world of lifestyle financial planning, the idea is to know your client…better! When we start asking questions such as ‘How responsible is this client with their money?’; ‘Can I influence my clients behaviour?’; ‘What will make them deviate from the strategy?’, and ‘How do they make decisions?’, we can not only provide better suitable advice but also better personalised financial advice.

While many advisors aren’t trained as life planners, psychologists, money coaches, or life coaches, the role of a financial advisor can often overlap with the fields of psychology and coaching.

Many advisors consider lifestyle financial planning or life-centred planning as a new-age and alternative planning philosophy and often seem reluctant to make changes to their current strategy. After all, if you’ve built a successful business on traditional financial advice principles, the question can be: What value will this new and exciting way of planning hold for my business and my client base? While this is a valid question, what we’ve found is that even the most traditional advisors or planners already subconsciously use elements of coaching and client discovery.

Think for a moment about your current client discovery process. Typically, you already ask your client certain questions about their life. Compliance requires us nowadays to ask even more questions to establish the source of funds, for example. Selling life insurance policies also requires a fair amount of client discovery.