By: Paul Morrone
In the world of finance, the late summer/early fall is informally known as conference season. Regardless of your role, there are a host of different events to cater to your experience, technical expertise, industry affiliation or level of production. While it may seem like a lot of fun and games, these conferences are one of the best ways to interact with our peers, share best practices, get technical insights and stay on top of industry news. Because there is such a wide variety of content out there, it is important for us to be selective and choose the ones that will have the highest impact on our business by driving increases in client service, growth and operational efficiency (including, now, AI adoption).
For our team, conference season starts with LPL’s annual conference called Focus, which Preston has attended for the past several years. As our primary custodian of client assets, LPL serves a valuable role in how we interact with our clients beyond simply holding their money. This includes capabilities related to research, technology, trading, moving money and the digital interface that clients use to view their investment activity. The theme this year was driven heavily by technology and AI, as LPL (along with virtually every other financial company) is investing hundreds of millions of dollars into intelligent workflows, data-based insights, and tech-driven efficiencies to make sure that we can spend more time working directly with clients than on task completion.
Moving into the fall, I will be attending the Great Valley Advisors (GVA) annual conference, followed shortly thereafter by an executive coaching roundtable which I’ve been a part of for the past year. Compared to the behemoth that is the LPL conference (over 5,000 attendees), these events generally see 200 or less people. As you can imagine, these are much more intimate and focus heavily on peer-to-peer connections and networking. Instead of industry wide or broad topics, technical sessions are generally tailored to advisory firms like Nexa and are centered around deep dives into things like practice management, growth strategies and technology adoption.
Because of how rapidly things change in our industry it is impossible to implement everything we learned while we were away, but the benefits of attending these conferences extends well beyond the actionable items that we use in our day-to-day lives here. There is always momentum when someone comes home from an event, and our entire team can feed off the energy. From an attendee standpoint, it triggers a new level of motivation when you’re surrounded by other business owners that are all facing the same challenges and celebrating the same successes as you are.
It’s a great community to be a part of, and most are more than willing to share best practices, fun ideas or process improvement ideas to help their peers. In fact, some of our client’s favorite events, gifts or ideas have come from others who I’ve interacted with over the years. As conference season continues to roll, we look forward to launching new initiatives in our office that will directly benefit those we work with.
Ticket Number: T011424
Investment advice offered through Great Valley Advisor Group, a Registered Investment Advisor. Great Valley Advisor Group and Nexa Financial Group are separate entities.
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