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

Nobody Wants the $400,000 Producer

That’s what the editor of Financial Planning concludes from their 2026 analysis of pay grids. Every year Financial Planning obtains compensation plans from the national and regional brokerage firms and computes base compensation by applying a consistent product mix to...

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...

Optimizing the Second Story Strategy

According to last year’s BISA-sponsored study by Aite-Novarica, median production of second story advisors in 15 bank-based investment services firms was 2.2 times the median production of branch-based advisors in 28 financial institution practices. Source:  Growth...

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Meet Kehrer Group

Since the founding of Kenneth Kehrer Associates in 1985, the investment advice community in banks and credit unions has looked to Kehrer analytics and insights to inform strategies that drive results. Today we launch Kehrer Group to enhance our capabilities and better...

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Disintermediation Déjà Vu

During one of the peer group discussions at our Top Director Awards, the finalists in the mega and large firm categories ruefully reported that, after a hiatus of several years, they were once again facing pushback from bankers about investment sales disintermediating...

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Needed: Better Tracking and Reporting

By now you are neck-deep in planning and budgeting for 2023. What metrics are you managing to as you look to the year ahead? Revenue growth? Assets? Profit margin? From our perspective, the core objective of the investment services unit inside a bank or credit union...

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