When you meet someone for the first time, one of the first questions they tend to ask is, “What do you do for a living?” The way I like to answer this question is by saying, “I help people navigate financial decisions in their lives to help them achieve the goals that will bring them the most joy.”
Financial planning and the service we offer to clients is foundational to what we do at PWL. As a team leader, my priority is to ensure that the advisor team provides a consistent, high-quality client experience regardless of which team member works with a client. Coaching with a values-based approach has proven to be a more effective way to achieve alignment and better results.
PWL’s core values run through the veins of our organization and provide a great summary of the ‘WHY’ we do what we do:
As a wealth management firm that provides discretionary portfolio management, we have a fiduciary duty to our clients. Fiduciary duty means that we are obligated to put the best interests of clients first in all circumstances. PWL advisors have a highly trusted relationship with our clients, and we take this responsibility very seriously.
To demonstrate our commitment to our clients, we have taken our fiduciary responsibility to a higher standard by being registered with the Centre for Fiduciary Excellence (CEFEX). This is a voluntary registration that requires PWL to adhere to best practices in the financial industry. CEFEX conducts an annual audit at PWL to validate that we are continually placing the interest of the client first. All advisors are proud to share this registration and stories about how they have put the client’s interest first.
It is common for investors to think that they have the secret sauce to outperform markets and to determine the best time to invest. Rather than letting emotions, ego or economic forecasts drive investing decisions, our team always digs into the evidence first.
People often ask: “How do you think the stock market is going to perform this year?” or “Is now a good time to invest?” These questions often come up when someone has a large lump sum of money they are tentative to invest. It can be tempting to hold your money in cash and slowly invest a little bit each month in the market in hopes of avoiding short-term losses.
When we dove into the evidence, we found that you would be better off in over 60% of cases to invest the entire lump sum right away rather than investing a little bit at time – regardless of market conditions. This analysis is summarized in the white paper Dollar Cost-Averaging vs. Lump Sum Investing if you want to learn more.
Academic evidence underpins all the advice that we provide. We pride ourselves on implementing the latest research in investing, financial planning, and behavioural finance. Our team takes a collaborative approach by actively sharing knowledge with each other on a regular basis to leverage the expertise of each team member. Team members share their findings with pride and are comfortable saying ‘I don’t know, but I will look into it.’ This eliminates the rules of thumb and speculative advice that may happen elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the financial industry can have conflicts of interest. One of the most common sources of conflict are the fees paid to advisors. There are two main ways a wealth management advisor can get paid. The first type of compensation is commission-based where an advisor is paid through products and/or transactions that are implemented in the client’s portfolio.
When an advisor is paid by commission, there is an inherent conflict of interest. An advisor can be biased to sell the product which has the highest commissions, not what is best for the client. Since the advisor is paid through the product, the fees are not always transparent the client.
A more transparent alternative form of advisor compensation is fee-based. With this method advisors are paid directly by the client. The advisor charges a fee based on a percentage of the client’s investment portfolio. The percentage fee charged typically decreases as the portfolio increases in value. With this model, there is no incentive to sell a particular product, so this essentially removes the conflict of interest when it comes to investments. Fee-based compensation is much more transparent as clients can see the fees on each monthly statement.
PWL is paid by clients through the fee-based method as we feel this is in the best of interest of our clients. Since we are not biased by commission incentives related to products our advisors are able to give great conflict-free advice to clients.
The wealth management industry is continuously evolving. Our team strives to always be on the leading edge of innovation when it comes to financial advice. We integrate with external industry professionals including accountants, lawyers, economists, psychologists, professors, insurance brokers, and many other experts to continuously expand the expertise of our advisor team.
One recent example of thinking differently is the research Braden Warwick and Ben Felix completed on the Optimal Compensation Saving, and Consumption for Owners of Canadian Controlled Private Corporations. In this paper they do a deep dive to analyze the best compensation models for owners of private corporations. This peer-reviewed research has been implemented into a custom-built tool to allow us to do advanced planning calculations that are not possible with any other planning software currently available in the marketplace. The tool allows us to provide recommendations backed by data analysis that is custom to the client’s situation.
Advisors are encouraged to complete their own research and present findings to colleagues to implement with clients. When this happens, advisors are proud to share with the rest of the team and this leads to everyone diving deeper whenever a unique situation arises.
Our primary focus at PWL is providing a client experience so great that clients want to tell their friends and colleagues about their experience. We want to profoundly impact how people think about their money and lifestyle goals. We are confident that we can grow PWL’s presence to help more Canadians by providing high quality personalized advice grounded in academic evidence.
We share client success, not sales targets which drives a culture of meeting more families to share what we do.
I joined PWL about 6 years ago and I can honestly say that this is the best team I have ever been a part of in my career. Our team has experienced exceptional growth since I have been at the firm and every one of my colleagues is highly driven, focused on continuous learning, and committed to providing the absolute best experience to anyone who deals with PWL.
Our team attracts many strong personalities with unique approaches to helping clients. Focusing on values rather than rules allows us to leverage these individual talents instead of trying to fit them to a mold.
By aligning our strategy, objectives, and decisions with our core values, we see the best outcomes for both our team members and for our clients. When core values are clear it makes decisions much easier. If you or someone you know aligns with these values, contact us and someone from our team would be happy to have a conversation with you.
