How an OSJ Can Help Financial Professionals Contain Costs
Happy New Year! It’s that time again when we set fresh resolutions. For some, it’s about getting healthier; for others, it’s about boosting their financial well-being. Whether you are making resolutions for your personal life or your business, the new year is a perfect time to commit to an updated set of goals.
Independent financial professionals are experiencing increasing amounts of competition. In today’s environment, if one of your business resolutions is to streamline your practice and make it more profitable, there are many tactics to consider.
Your goal setting may focus on new revenues, reduced expenses, and more profit in 2024. These are admirable goals, but the devil’s in the details, as usual. How are you going to pursue broad goals that have numerous non-controllables?
There are certainly several ways you can accelerate the growth and profitability of your business, each with its pros and cons. But, there is one way you can tackle multiple challenges with one solution. That is to partner with the right OSJ.
An Office of Supervisory Jurisdiction (OSJ) can play a critical role in helping you improve growth, operations, and profitability.
To get the ball rolling, this blog article will describe various ways an OSJ can be instrumental in your cost-containment efforts for 2024.
1. Streamlined Compliance and Supervision
One of the primary functions of an OSJ is to oversee compliance and the need for supervision.
An OSJ takes on the responsibility of ensuring that advisors adhere to the complex regulatory requirements of the financial services industry. This oversight includes monitoring trading activities, reviewing advertising, and ensuring the proper handling of client funds and securities.
This can be a significant advantage for you when it shifts the heavy burden of compliance management off your shoulders to a third party. By delegating these tasks to an OSJ, you can focus more of your time on client retention services and adding new clients to your practice.
Using an OSJ for compliance management can also help reduce costs associated with maintaining a separate, comprehensive compliance operation. There is an opportunity for quality to go up and compliance expenses to go down.
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2. Operational Efficiencies
An OSJ can offer economies of scale generally unavailable to individual advisors or smaller firms. By pooling resources, an OSJ can provide access to better technology, more advanced tools, and other resources at a much lower cost.
This sharing of resources leads to operational efficiencies, reducing the overall cost burden for independent financial advisors.
3. Access to Varied Expertise
When you partner with an OSJ, you can access a team of financial professionals with years of experience providing back-office operations to independent financial advisor firms.
This access can help you make informed decisions, avoid costly mistakes, and stay updated with new and changing regulations.
Consider the cost you would have to assume if you tried to employ this knowledge and expertise in-house or if you were to outsource these types of work to several specialized consultants and operations professionals.
4. Marketing and Branding Support
Many OSJs offer marketing and branding development support to their affiliated advisors. This support can include state-of-the-art website development, social media management, and email marketing services.
The OSJ can offer valuable support by evaluating your marketing strategy and offering valuable recommendations based on years of best practices.
In addition, the OSJ can help you identify your target markets and the best ways to reach them. Your ideal markets could be based on age, income, profession, business, or other criteria. This type of support can make your firm more marketable and improve your results.
For example, investors prefer specialized financial advisors who work with people like themselves. They believe the advisors’ specializations will benefit them.
The more effective your marketing, the lower your average cost for producing new leads, clients, and revenues.
5. Training and Development
We live in a rapidly changing digital world, so independent financial professionals must stay on top of industry trends and technologies that impact their results. But who has the time to do this?
This is where the services of an OSJ can be very beneficial. They provide training and development services for various topics, including technology, financial product reviews, compliance, marketing strategies, and regulatory updates.
If you had to research and pay for this training, it could be very costly and take up more of one of your primary assets – your time.
6. Networking and Collaborative Opportunities
Finding a mentor or business coach can be very costly. However when partnering with an OSJ, numerous networking and mentoring opportunities are available for no additional fees.
These networks create collaborative work environments, sharing best practices, new ideas, and peer group learning opportunities.
7. Negotiating Power
An OSJ, with its collective strength of large numbers, will have more negotiating power with most vendors and service providers. This power can translate into lower costs for services like software subscriptions, research tools, and other resources that help you manage your business.
8. Flexibility and Customization
Many OSJs offer a level of flexibility and customization in their services. This flexibility means you can choose the services you need, avoiding unnecessary expenses for services that don’t align with your business requirements.
The best OSJs take a variety of approaches to their services to independent financial advisors.
About Evolution Financial Advisors
We are a Large Enterprise/OSJ that provides a wide range of back-office services to independent financial advisors throughout New York State and other regions in the U.S.
Our leadership is actively involved in the decision-making by various influential councils. These councils play a significant role in shaping Evolution’s business strategies, policies, and services.
Connect with us to learn more about our services for independent financial professionals.
