The challenges facing leaders today create a complex business landscape: Your business is more global, the pace is faster, technology is reframing your competitive world while customers, armed with more information and more choices, are changing their expectations and demands.

That picture also reflects the challenges that face the more than 6,000 registered investment advisors who work with TD Ameritrade, leaders of firms that manage a total of more than $3 trillion of assets for their clients. While they deal with the increasing complexity of the financial world, market volatility and a changing regulatory environment, these advisors also manage their own businesses and face their own leadership challenges around growth, technology, sustainability and customer relationship.

That’s why TD Ameritrade recently brought together a group of 200 top registered investment advisors (RIAs) for a leadership conference at The Broadmoor in Colorado. The three-day event featured speakers such as presidential biographer and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, talking about strategies for leadership and resilience and self-reflection. The program also included workshops that explored management trends and insights into the future of the advisor industry.

Tim Hockey, president and CEO of TD Ameritrade, described the world of today’s advisors as one that is being reshaped by technology, hyper-connectivity and a shifting customer experience. In working with TD Ameritrade’s clients, providing services that range from a portfolio platform to advocacy and management consultant, Hockey said the company takes a holistic view of developing leadership.

“Advisors look to us for best practices, not just in running the business but in becoming a better leader,” he said. “The best leaders constantly ask how can I be a better leader, not just so I can think through a business problem or get a competitive edge, but so I can develop as a human being. The best leaders are lifelong students.”

Hockey singled out some areas where leaders of advisor firms – and other organizations – must adjust to new ways of operating:

Technology Changes the Game – But Not in the Way We Expected. In the early days, people said the Internet will do away with the middle man in investing and other services. With so much information and so many transaction channels available, some experts said people would believe they no longer need an advisor. That did not turn out to be true, Hockey said. With so much data and information overwhelming them, people are turning to advisors. Indeed, the RIA channel has experience significant growth in the past decade.

But the winners in the future will be the advisors who understand that technology allows them to be more efficient – and find new ways demonstrate their value to clients.

“The ability to build an asset allocation model is now table stakes – we have technology that can do that,” Hockey said. He pointed to TD Ameritrade’s open-architecture platform that provides trading and portfolio management, giving advisors the ability to customize their offerings and supply a variety of portfolio strategies that tap into the minds of money managers without any of the complexities associated with outsourcing portfolio construction.

Hockey predicted a world where technology like Amazon’s Alexa would be part of the advisor toolkit, providing quotes, and fact and figures in meetings while the advisors deploy online platforms to create portfolios and offer highly personalized services.

“The best advisors will understand technology tools to automate so they can specialize in what cannot be automated,” he said. “The winners in the future will be the ones who embrace technology and use it to move upstream.”

What Worked with Customers in the Past Won’t be Enough in the Future. The old customer relationship model has been blown apart for advisors, Hockey said. “Just doing an asset allocation model has gone the way of the dinosaur,” said Hockey. “Customers now have many more feeds of information and they have more inputs and they can log on to see returns. If you are an advisor today, you must be more knowledgeable, be quicker to respond, and be clear about your strategies and your unique value.”

Customers come armed with information and questions to meetings and they check on credentials and reputations online, he said. Advisors can’t assume that clients will automatically agree with recommendations. They must focus on specialized client needs, while finding new ways of ensuring constant communication and information, aided by technology. “The new way of doing business is highly relationship-oriented and less transactional – even if it is easy to fall in the trap of thinking we should just focus on the data” he said.

And Hockey said advisors must develop a new conversation with clients about uncertainty. “We are in the longest bull run in history, so a generation of advisors have never seen a downturn,” Hockey said. “Since 1981, clients have not lived through rising interest rates. But this will change and life will change. The best clients are geared up now, talking to clients about preparing for it. They are helping them understand that it won’t always be sweetness and light.”

Managing Growth Looks Different When You are at the Top. Succession and talent management are big issues in many of TD Ameritrade’s advisor firms. The average advisor owner/ leader is now over 50 and as they think about the future of their company and scaling up, their clients also want to know what will happen to their accounts in a new generation of leadership. So recruitment that will help firms mirror the diversity of a new pool of clients is important.

And leading a team of younger advisors also demands new skills, Hockey said. “Command and control is passé,” he said. “Today you have to tap into talent in a new way to get out the box. We have to focus on pushing down decision making so the new ideas come up.”

To learn more about strategies for leadership from TD Ameritrade click here.

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