Investment Advisors Maximize Efficiency and Client Service With Enterprise Advisory Services Platform
A Conversation With Ron Martin, CFP®, Managing Partner, and Patti Meier, Senior Vice President, Premier Financial Partners
Premier Financial Partners
Business Snapshot
Premier Financial Partners is a comprehensive financial services firm and registered investment advisor that provides customized programs to facilitate the accumulation, preservation and transfer phases of clients’ financial lives. PFP offers planning services, wealth management, estate planning and insurance.
Business Leader
Ron Martin, CFP®, Managing Partner
Headquarters
St. Louis, Missouri
What are the biggest challenges you face as a business?
The biggest challenges we face are related to finding a suitable technology interface that enables us to best serve our clients’ cash management needs while also working with clients’ varying levels of technology proficiency.
We are also always looking for ways to improve our systems and workflows, and the programs we incorporate need to support and contribute to those workflows, not make them more demanding on the advisor or the client.
Similarly, we focus on staffing and ongoing training for our team, which ties back to technology and the systems that we adopt and ensures that we are utilizing their capabilities to the greatest extent and according to state regulations.
How did Enterprise help solve these challenges?
We first started using Enterprise Bank & Trust’s Enterprise Advisor Services (EAS) platform because of the excellent rates and higher yield available for our clients’ brokerage accounts compared to traditional brokerage accounts. We quickly realized that the technology was aiding us in servicing our clients’ cash management needs, and in turn, created a partnership that allows us to continue acting in our clients’ best interest.
The EAS platform has also granted us the opportunity to offer something different than other advisors. The Albridge Wealth Reporting® feed has been a huge plus for us with its consolidated reporting. It allows us to be more comprehensive in understanding our clients’ needs. When a client has a question, we can see the full picture and all the activity we need to in one place and be able to answer their questions swiftly.
We also have a dedicated Enterprise team member who is an outstanding liaison and, simple but extremely important, she always does what she says she is going to do. The team is communicative and efficient, and they make it easy to do business with Enterprise. It’s the people behind EAS who set the platform and the experience apart from other programs and platforms we’ve used in the past.
What is the impact on your business?
Using EAS enables us to deliver a higher level of service and make a more significant impact on our clients. This relationship has improved our ability to advise on financial matters, giving us a deeper understanding of each client's entire portfolio. With the information provided by EAS, we can take a more comprehensive approach to financial planning, moving beyond a plan on paper to real-time plan execution.
Our clients also appreciate being able to contact us directly with questions, which allows us to preserve strong and meaningful relationships with our clients, since they can reach out to our team for personal assistance, no impersonal 1-800 phone numbers.
Overall, we are more effective and more efficient with EAS in our technology stack.
