Ameriprise – “What training?”

Pros

Financial planning is a forward looking focus. It allows a competent advisor to discuss the full financial spectrum with a client, and most clients love the idea of truly knowing if they are protected and doing enough for retirement. It is an easy thing to pitch, and most people find value in knowing if they are doing the right things.

Cons

While Ameriprise boasts about its massive training effort and employee development, those things were far from true. By training, I learned how to funnel people down into VUL policies by declaring that Term never pays, Whole Life and Universal Life are archaic, and thus a VUL is the only logical choice for today's consumer. "Have you heard about it's tax benefits!?" Management was inadequate while it was there, and has now been decimated. There is no support for young advisors trying to learn and grow their business. Now they are luring bigger producers away from the wirehouses with visions of grand payouts, but the back office cannot support the ways that big producer is typically doing business. Sluggish technology, Ameriprise believes in building software not buying it. At the end of the day, this company is a battleship in a creek when the entire industry is turning. Financial planning is a great formula for success. The market needs it. This is not the place to do it.

Advice to Senior Management

Teach advisors how to competently write a financial plan for a client. New advisors don't know how to do this, and the talent that you are drawing from wirehouses doesn't know it either. If you hire pure brokers and don't teach them the value add that Ameriprise offers from a niche market standpoint, they are not going to pick it up through osmosis.

Eliminating the MFA position was a horrible mistake in a culture that is already lacking in sales support. Bring in educators to teach the art of financial planning, not just wholesalers that can sling mutual funds.

If you don't want to be a wirehouse, why are you hiring only those people, cutting off training, focusing on assets alone, and trapping people in P1 with outrageous exit costs?