In this special episode honoring Women’s History Month we feature four successful women in our channel who have each made unique contributions to making our industry a better place to work for women aspiring to be financial service professionals. Our discussion focuses on what it takes to be a female leader in our channel, and what advice our guests have for women who may be just starting out in our industry.

Topics include:

• Making our channel more attractive to women
• Advice for women just starting out in our industry
• Thoughts on effectively recruiting women
• Gratifying “women’s power” moments

We also discuss things that the panelist’s work colleagues don’t know about them 🙂

The topic for this episode is “Growth Beyond the Branches” and we use BISA’s recent research report of the same name as a basis for the discussion. Our guests are Mike Miroballi of Huntington, and Brian Surovik of Ameriprise.

Topic covered include:

• The evolving role of the branch
• The future of the branch-based advisor
• Branches as “community centers”
• Countering less referrals with higher quality referrals
• Leveraging the digital experience
• The Remote Advisor profit center
• Second Story growth

Oh boy, we also make Super Bowl predictions…

For this episode we’re joined by executives leading the charge in three third-party broker dealers that serve our channel: Chris Melton of Ameriprise, Jim Norwood of Securities America, and Dan O’Brien of LPL. We discuss leveraging lessons learned in 2021 to get off to a fast start in 2022. Topics include:

• New measurements of success
• Reinvention of branches
• Fee-for-service
• Providing choice – the RIA factor
• Attracting the NextGens

We also talk about the best concerts we saw in 2021 🙂

Come join us!

For this episode we initiate a focus on what it takes to be a top performing program. For the next series of BISA episodes we will interview program managers from top performing programs in our benchmarking research. This month we interviewed David Biliter from First Citizens, a program that holds the #1 position for household revenue penetration. We were also joined by Matt Barhorst of Ameriprise, one of the top BDs in the nation..

 Topics include:

• Creating a culture of advice
• Removing friction from the process
• Creating a career path towards Second Story Advisors
• Cross-departmental cooperation
• Earning the trust of lenders
• Getting past the “$300K GDC Wall”
• Creating a fully functional remote advisor center
• Having client discussions about the Protection Need

Tim Sease, the 26 year veteran of South State Bank, and Sam Nasser, a 17 year veteran of the third-party BD world currently with Ameriprise, join us for a discussion on revenue drivers net of market performance, differentiation, leveraging planning in a low interest rate environment, covering the protection need, meeting our real competition head-on, and the importance of culture.

Chris Melton of Ameriprise and Tim Killgoar of Raymond James discuss how to continue 2021’s gravity-defying momentum, best-practice differentiators, competing with other channels, and recruiting.

This month we are joined by Pete Dunlap of Citizens Bank, Jim Fujinaga of Hancock Whitney, and Kyle Stroud of Centennial Bank.

In addition to industry trends our panel discusses the strategic initiatives driving their programs through 2021 and beyond including client segmentation, rep force tiering, increasing financial planning, working the bank, and becoming a “Trusted Advisor”.

For this episode we are joined by Jane-Ellen Porter of People’s United, and Vance Richard of First Horizon. In addition to industry trends this episode dives into strategic issues such as centralized financial planning, employing insurance specialists, the importance of cross-departmental relationships, sales force tiering and nurturing book-based advisors.