Making money does not mean everything.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “Hope Finance” (ID: Xinfinance), Author: Hung Ruo Xin, Yi Lei.
Is the market driven or the investment advisory model changed the question of “funds make money, but the citizens don’t make money”?
——Xin Finance
Shanghai United: Celebrate the New Year happily
Xialian: A miserable heart-breaking trouble for the Lantern Festival
Horizontal batch: Can’t hide past the first day but not the fifteenth day
This is a joke circulated on the Internet not long ago, and it is indeed a true portrayal of many people’s “funding” (fund investment) life.
Especially after the Spring Festival, with the successive sharp drops in the stock market, the performance of many funds returned to pre-liberation overnight. “Before the Spring Festival, I can’t wait for every day to be a trading day. I don’t want to pass the year anymore. Now I want to rush to the exchange to switch off the power.”
In the past year, in this dramatic market trend, the fund industry has also undergone many unprecedented changes-the scale and time of fundraising of “explosive funds” have set records one after another, fund live broadcasts have gradually become normalized, and star funds The manager “out of the circle” one after another, not only frequent hot searches, but even a fan group.
From the product and service level, the “investment advisory license” pilot project that began in October 2019 is also part of the changes. Some market views believe that this may be an inflection point in the investment market of China’s mutual funds—from a seller’s market to Buyer’s market, from short-term speculation to long-term allocation.
Judging from the pilot anniversary transcripts disclosed by various institutions at the end of last year, the scale of investment advisory business has grown rapidly, the repurchase rate data is good, and most of them have helped customers achieve positive returns. But from the perspective of investment consulting model innovation, product experience, and user scale, it is clear that there is still a long way to go.
Exactly one year has passed since the issuance of the last batch of investment advisory licenses. How effective is this new model, which is considered to be expected to change the pattern of the wealth management market? Does the investment advisory model make financial management easier? With these questions in mind, we chatted with 100 users who have used the “investment advisory” service.
(Remarks: The survey samples come from the readers of several wealth management professionals and friends around us. We screened out users who have purchased investment advisory products/services, and consciously excluded financial practitioners and other professional groups.)< /p>
1. “Broken the circle”.
When talking to 100 investors about the topic of investment advice, the most frequent word was: “Worry-free, convenient, and smart.”
“You don’t need to watch the market by yourself, eliminating the entanglement of timing trading.” This is the most intuitive and most impressive feature of everyone’s investment consulting experience.
In the final analysis, this feeling stems from the “financial management” authority granted by the investment advisory license.
Compared with products such as fund FOF and fund portfolio, under the investment advisory model, institutions can help clients select investment targets and decide when to buy and sell, and execute them on their behalf.
Picture source: Ping An Securities “Reflections on the First Anniversary of Fund Investment Advisors”
But from another perspective, this is almost the only memory point left by the investment consultant.
The face of investment consulting is still very vague, almost no one can say clearly: What is investment consulting? For them, it is more like buying a fund product with a convenient experience.
The factors that determine their choice of an investment advisory product are still: profit, rate and risk.
Disappointingly, apart from optimizing the “investment” experience, the investors interviewed hardly perceive the “Gu” part.
After experiencing a variety of investment advisory services in the market, Xin Finance will find that the operation ideas and operating procedures of each institution are highly similar:
Before investment-user portrait, strategy matching
Investment-order placement, position adjustment, monitoring
Post-investment-account report, accompany service, etc.
In addition to the “simplification” of the operational aspects involved in investment, the current “innovation” of the investment advisory business before and after investment is more like an integration of existing service models and operating procedures. Kind of optimization and extension.
“The pre-investment questionnaire has more detailed questions, the investment strategy will match the life stage, and the post-investment information will be more…” Some investors mentioned the difference between buying investment advisory products and buying funds in the past.
Picture Source: Ji Slow Platform
But this form is better than the actual change, and it did not impress investors too much.
After all, there was a KYC link in buying funds in the past. In addition, in recent years, various institutions and platforms have attached great importance to the popularization of investor education and the concept of “accompaniment”, and there is no shortage of post-investment.Consultation or push of related information.
The advantages of a multitude of people and tailored clothes included in an ideal investment advisory service have not been reflected.
Existing investment advisory products are more like the intermediate form of the past fund sales model and asset management business. In essence, investment can be entrusted with discretionary power, but the form is still a sale product.
The result of this situation is that it does not touch the core of investment advisory business development: solving the “trust” problem.
It is difficult for investors to deepen their understanding of investment advice and the long-term investment philosophy that this model should convey. This has also led to almost all the interviewees being in a state of indifference, “buy some and try it.”
2, invest in the “first year”
In fact, this also reflects the current dilemma of the investment advisory business. It is difficult for institutions to get rid of the shackles of existing experience. In a state of careful “testing the waters”, most institutions have chosen the safest and most conservative approach, that is, making adjustments to their existing business models.
One of the most typical examples is that one of the most important significances of the original investment advisory business development is that the transformation of the model brings about a change in the way of institutional income-from “seller agency” to “buyer investment advisory”. The service fee charged by the scale of management assets replaces the handling fee incurred by the sales transaction.
But the reality is that in order to cater to user habits, various institutions have tried their best to discount management fees and service fees, which essentially circumvents the old way of fund sales.
Of course, there are also some platforms that are exploring differentiated service models. For example, Harvest Fund refers to the experience of the U.S. market and adopts membership-based investment advisory services, that is, during the management process, the subscription fee and subscription of funds in the member’s portfolio are exempted Entrust fund investment advisors to manage accounts on behalf of funds, redemption fees, fund switching fees, etc., to increase fund returns.
In addition, there are some brokerage platforms that use the advantages of offline outlets to increase face-to-face post-investment management, so that investors have a more obvious experience of “Gu”. And, through this one-to-one communication, we can provide more customized investment advice and services.
From the data point of view, 2020 is a well-deserved “first year” of investment advisory, with the launch of licenses and pilot expansion, institutions and investors are full of enthusiasm.
Among the 18 companies that have obtained investment advisory licenses, 5 public equity funds and fund subsidiaries are the most active. Southern, China, China Europe and Harvest launched related products as early as the end of 2019. Launched “E Fund Investment Adviser” this month.
Followed by three fund sales companies, among them, Ant Group launched “Help you to invest” in March last year; in August, Tencent Licaitong announced “to invest together”; in October, the individual fund sales company of Yingmi The service platform is slow to launch the “four money” investment advisory services.
At the same time, investment advisors from the brokerage department are also fully engaged. Guolian Securities, Galaxy Securities, Guotai Junan, Shen WanhongAnd Huatai Securities launched a number of investment advisory products last year and began to test the waters.
Public information shows that Guotai Junan’s “Junxiang Investment” business will serve more than 30,000 customers in 2020. As of the latest data, the scale of fund investment advisory management of Guolian Securities has exceeded 7 billion yuan, and the number of contractors has reached 70,000; Galaxy Securities has entrusted customers of close to 50,000, and retained assets of about 2 billion yuan.
Aside from the differences in the main body of the organization, the current investment advisory business can be divided into a self-built model and a cooperative model. The latter mainly refers to that some institutions will have their own investment advisory products, which will also be exported to other platforms or introduced into other institutions’ investment advisory products. Among them, funds and brokerages are mainly self-built models, and third-party sales platforms tend to be cooperative models.
From the perspective of performance, at the end of last year, fund companies that first launched investment advisory services successively released data for their first anniversary.
Among them, China Southern Fund’s “Sinantou” accounted for more than 90% of the holding customers who obtained positive returns, and the investment advisory strategy repurchase rate exceeded 70%; the business situation of “Charlie Smart Investment” disclosed by China Wealth Management showed that, Its customer profit is 3350 yuan, and the user retention rate is over 80%.
In addition, the earlier launch of “Help You Invest” attracted about 200,000 new customers within 100 days, with a total investment of 2.2 billion yuan, and a repurchase rate of over 80% in three months; three slower products went online Months later, the number of investment advisory contracted customers exceeded 90,000, the investment advisory services assets under management exceeded 7 billion, the customer retention rate was 96.8%, and the positive customer revenue ratio was 98.5%.
The development time of the investment advisory business is still short, but from the disclosed data, although the average investment amount of customers is not high, the repurchase rate and retention rate are excellent, and the overall scale of investment advisory business is also growing faster fast. Moreover, the proportion of profitable customers is very high, basically above 70%.
Of course, these performances were affected to a certain extent by the booming market industry last year.
Under the bull market, 2020 has become the “super year” of funds. According to statistics released by the Galaxy Securities Fund Research Center, as of December 31, 2020, a total of 1,441 public funds of various types will be issued in 2020, with a raised scale of 3.16 Trillion yuan, the number and scale of fundraising both hit a record high since 1998.
So, whether the market is driving or the investment advisory model has changed the question of “funds make money, but citizens don’t make money”, it remains the test of time.
But what is certain is that with the rapid expansion of market demand and the continuous maturity of laws and regulations, customer experience and other conditions, the “0 to 1” break of fund investment advisory is accelerating. In the future, it will play an increasingly important role in the development of public funds and even the wealth management market.