Lena Haas says she and her colleagues at Edward Jones know their clients almost never want relationships with their financial advisors that are merely transactional.
As head of wealth management advice and solutions at the St. Louis-based firm, Haas finds herself always on the search for new ways for wealth managers to gain insights into their customers' needs and goals and establish a real connection. The latest step in that direction comes in the form of a partnership with U.S. Bank.
Starting next year, Edward Jones clients will be able to open checking accounts at the Minneapolis-based bank and take out credit cards bearing the name of both firms. They'll be able to access the new products through Edward Jones' website or on their phones using the Edward Jones app.
Besides providing clients with the convenience of being able to tie their brokerage and advisory accounts to their bank accounts, the new offerings will give Edward Jones greater insight into clients' spending and saving habits.
"The reason we thought banking was so very important is because that is clearly how our clients want to be helped in that holistic way that takes into account the short term and the medium term, along with the longer-term goals and priorities," Haas said. "And also, by the way, we see in a lot of our client research that there is a desire for banking relationships. Specifically, folks really appreciate the convenience of having banking functionality in the same place as financial advice."
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The partnership with U.S. Bank comes after Edward Jones gave up on previous plans to open its own bank and then later a similar deal to
Since November 2023, all of Edward Jones' branches have had access to the fintech firm Envestnet's MoneyGuide product. MoneyGuide provides charts and graphs that users can easily manipulate to visualize how changes in things like spending and saving are likely to affect their ability to, say, retire by a certain age.
The firm says more than 1.3 million of its 8 million clients have begun to make use of MoneyGuide. Edward Jones, meanwhile, has brought a new customer relationship management system — or CRM — provided by the industry giant Salesforce to 5,500 of its branches.
And it's seeking to remain attractive to its mass-affluent clients through a recent pricing adjustment. Edward Jones recently decided to lower the fees charged on assets in the $500,000 to $1 million range to 1.2% from 1.25%. Central to all these changes is Haas, who joined Edward Jones in 2017 following stints at E-trade, Bank of America's Merrill and Fidelity Investments.
She recently sat down with Financial Planning to discuss Edward Jones' interest in banking products and the firm's goal of playing a larger role in the lives of its clients.
This article has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Financial Planning: In what ways will this new banking offering help advisors deepen their relationships with clients?
Lena Haas: The majority of our clients say they don't want a transactional relationship with an advisor. They want a relationship where the advisor is there, and the relationship is deep. The advisor really understands them, their families, values, needs, wants and wishes.
That inherently involves conversations on things like trade-offs. You know, how do you prioritize what you're doing today and spending versus saving for the future? Do you have an emergency fund to get through the tough times? Do you have an understanding of current spending?
When our advisors work with our clients, it's about optimizing the overall behavior. What is the right amount of assets to have in liquid accounts? What is the right amount to have in emergency funds that is somewhat readily accessible. What is the right amount to have for shorter-term goals that are one or two years away?
FP: How does MoneyGuide and Salesforce play into all this?
LH: We've received positive feedback from our advisors to the point that the adoption of MoneyGuide has been at more than twice the rate as we originally anticipated. So far, we have over 1.3 million clients who already have had in-depth planning conversations with their advisors using MoneyGuide.
We're also in the middle of our Salesforce rollout. Over 5,500 branches already have Salesforce, and we are on an aggressive pace to continue that throughout the year. What is really exciting to me is the combination of Salesforce, MoneyGuide and the way that we put them into action.
The way I think about it is that our 19,500-plus advisors have deep relationships with over 8 million clients and their families. Every week, there are over half a million client interactions. Now just imagine that the insights from those interactions, the relational and emotional insights, as well as transactional data from the client's interactions, is being harvested and made available to help financial advisors. Salesforce enables us to store and structure that data in a way that will transform the way that we help advisors.
FP: How do you go about encouraging advisors to make use of new offerings like MoneyGuide?
LH: We have a culture where financial advisors really share their knowledge and mentor each other. So when something new comes out, and financial advisors find, 'This is really adding a lot of value for how I can engage with my clients and how I can serve them,' that word spreads pretty quickly.
And it really does help with discovering client needs and goals and getting to know clients at a much deeper level. A person might have a 20-year relationship with a client but, in the process of using MoneyGuide, suddenly uncover something that they hadn't gotten to discuss.
FP: Have you got an example of what you mean?
LH: I'll give you a recent example that was shared with me. An advisor was doing portfolio construction for a client of his. She's a mother with a daughter who's a junior in high school. What they realized is that what she really wants is to ensure that after the daughter goes off to college, she's still going to come back sometimes. And her deepest worry is that that's not going to happen.
So, as a result, they accelerated a plan to buy a second home (near her daughter's school.) She was planning to do that eventually. But they accelerated it to do it now, to provide that sort of wonderful base for the family to come together.
This is why it's so important for the emotional well-being and happiness of the family. So that's what advisors are experiencing. Clients are reporting feeling more confidence after they complete the conversations that are enabled by MoneyGuide.
