Financial advisor

Usually, a financial adviser is a person who provides consulting services in the field of financial planning, both corporate and individual. A financial board may include appraisal activities, financial, investment, and management consulting based on the level of risk tolerance of your client and the size of his investment. The adviser tries to build stable relationships with his clients, which, as a rule, are oriented to long-term financial planning. In the individual financial services sector in Western countries, the services of financial advisers are popular with representatives with incomes that are slightly higher or significantly higher than the national average, usually with the aim of accumulating enough funds in advance to ensure a decent life in old age and / or after retirement. In many countries of the world, the profession of financial adviser has its own specifics (for example, an independent financial adviser or (NSF) in the UK and other countries of the British Commonwealth) and its activities are regulated by law . To achieve greater labor efficiency, financial advisers rarely operate one at a time and usually unite in guilds, which are large financial offices ( Morgan Stanley , Janney Montgomery ), often tied to banks .

1. At the initial stage of building relationships with a client, a financial analyst should thoroughly study individual situations, profile, portfolio, current state, initial financial condition, priorities and goals and wishes of the client, both in the short and long term. The wider the access of the financial analyst to the context, the higher the likelihood that his advice will be of the highest quality and useful. Often it is during the consultation process that a person realizes various alternative possibilities. However, far from always clients would like to be completely open regarding their current or desired financial situation with an adviser ^[1] .

2. Next, an active search and design of financial solution options is carried out to achieve the goals and objectives (they can be narrowly oriented, more complex, short, medium or long term). Often, the advice of a financial analyst is a whole chain of actions, unlimited by financial instruments alone, and containing, in addition to them, various social and legal aspects (connecting guarantors, changing property rights, ensuring transaction security, insurance, hedging, etc.); ^[2]

3. The adviser often offers his recommendations regarding the purchase or sale of certain financial products in order to optimize the financial future or the present client with the positions of credit, investment and insurance. Understanding the financial context of the client and the ratio of products in his portfolio in this case plays a key role. He also assesses the available room for maneuver and the criticality of possible deviations from the course. The adviser also has to simultaneously monitor all the conditions and information flows in the current securities market, which is very difficult in the current conditions of an overabundance of information both from the market itself and from various media. Thirdly, he should also become familiar with the peculiarities of the credit and insurance policies of different countries that interest the client, as well as often specific financial institutions. For example, in Europe and America, a discount on the rate for class A borrowers can reach 4% ^[3] .

4. Also, a financial adviser often has to deal with organizational issues in the process of implementing his recommendations and organizing interaction with financial institutions and third parties.

1. ↑ What Your Financial Advisor Should Not Tell You - Yahoo Finance
2. ↑ Methods for assessing the risks of an organization (neopr.) .
3. ↑ Independent consultation on personal finance management in Rostov-on-Don

Financial analyst is one of the so-called post-industrial professions. As a rule, he provides his services for a fee or for commissions structured by one of the following images:

• Hourly wage
• Annual rate for servicing an individual portfolio
• Commission for each transaction
• Percentage commission on the amount of the deposit, transaction or portfolio
• All kinds of margins

In the world of financial science, there has been a fairly long debate about the advisability of using individual investors as financial analysts in general and independent financial advisers in particular ^[1] . As a class, portfolios managed by financial advisors do not get statistically significant better results than passive investing in the current securities market. If we take into account the fact that they need to pay for their services, then portfolios managed by financial advisers bring even slightly less profit to their investors ^[2] . However, the moral support of financial analysts, as well as the lost profit of investors who receive more free time and can spend it on something else ( lost profit ), is difficult to evaluate in monetary terms in each individual case. The presence of online forums allows modern customers to increase the level of transparency of the activities of financial advisors and take a more objective look at the quality of their services ^[3] . For example, financial advisers of large financial offices are sometimes accused of wanting to work for the sake of clients, rather than the management of offices, which require advisers to constantly recruit a certain number of clients, to make a certain number of transactions from each portfolio in order to receive a commission, or to overuse mutual funds for the same reason ^[4] .

The use of financial advisers in Russia began relatively recently. Periods of good economic conditions in the 2000s and early 2010s allowed most of the population not to think about financial decisions. The sharp devaluation in December 2014 and the crisis of 2015 pushed the demand for professional financial planning. At present, in Russia there are only 15-20 professional companies or individuals offering the services of financial advisers.