Kehrer Group Highlighter
The Kehrer Group Highlighter packages some of our most important findings, insights, and commentary into bite-size, digestible articles. We make the Highlighters available for free to the entire financial advice community—a small gesture of appreciation for a community that has done so much to support our work.
The Latest Highlighters
Do Advisor Teams Do More Planning?
How Do Directors of Bank-Based Advisors Drive More Planning? After years of their directors encouraging advisors in banks and credit unions to embrace financial planning, our most recent survey found that the typical bank-based advisor still initiated planning with...
Widows Don’t Fire 70% of Their Advisors: How a Misunderstood Statistic Shaped an Industry Narrative
Ken Kehrer (Kehrer Group) and Luke Allchin (RFI Global) Part of the received wisdom in the financial services community is that 70% of widows change financial advisors after the death of their spouse. Where did that notion come from? We have looked...
Another Look at Whether Rightsizing Advisor Books Enables Advisors to Embrace Financial Planning
A Deeper Dive with Kehrer Group’s Advisor Level Database We analyzed the Kehrer Group benchmarking data and saw that there was only a weak correlation between the average advisor book size in a firm and its average advisor plan productivity or average household plan...
Self-Funding Advisor Growth:
How to Increase Advisor Headcount Without Squeezing Profit Margins Many financial institutions want to increase the fee income produced by their investment services businesses. But most are reluctant to reinvest some of the current fee income to achieve that...
Does Rightsizing Advisor Books Enable Advisors to Embrace Financial Planning?
What Does the Kehrer Group Benchmarking Data Say? In a discussion about the barriers to advisors doing more financial planning during the Fall Meeting of the Kehrer Leadership Study Group, Arthur Osman and Holly Grellier suggested that we look at whether reducing the...
Slow to Capitalize on Their Advantage, Are Banks Now Feeling the Urgency to Integrate Banking and Wealth Services?
At the Kehrer Group Top Directors Awards ceremony last November, we heard speakers reminding the finalists that financial institutions have the competitive advantage of being the only source for ALL of a family’s financial needs—transactions, savings & investment,...
Strong Q4 Performance Propelled Influencers Above Annual Growth Goals
Influencers Look to Add Advisors, Enhance Productivity with New Tech in 2026 Revenue from investment services increased 11% last year in 14 bellwether financial institution-based firms, thanks in part to a fourth quarter surge. Investment assets tracked closely...
Banks Making Progress in Rightsizing Advisors’ Books:
Practice Management Insights from the Kehrer Group Benchmarking Surveys The branch referral model at the core of most bank and credit union retail wealth management businesses has resulted in advisors stockpiling clients to the point that serving all of them is...
Financial Institutions Grow Their Advisor Forces, But Are They Keeping Up with the Opportunity?
Practice Management Insights from the Kehrer Group Benchmarking Surveys Kehrer Group research has demonstrated repeatedly that financial institutions tend to have too few financial advisors given their opportunity. Not only is adding advisors the most direct...
The Cost of Advisor Development
Do Associate Bank-Based Advisors Cover Their Cost? A cornerstone of Kehrer Group’s analysis of advisor force compensation is the calculation of the effective payout – total cash compensation as a percent of revenue produced – for each of the advisor roles in...