New Kaplan Financial Course Designed to Heighten Agents’ Credibility with Senior & Boomer Investors |
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Written by U.S. Insurance News
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Saturday, 22 December 2007 |
Kaplan Financial wants to help agents take the high road.
Kaplan Financial wants to help agents take the high road.
When financial advisors and insurance agents work with seniors and baby boomers, who represent a $16-trillion dollar market, they need to recognize that these individuals are vulnerable to fraud. So Kaplan wants to help professionals steer clear of hawking “too good to be true” offers that many in these age groups fall prey to by offering brokerage and investment firms a new course to certify the credibility of their sales people.
The course, “Suitability and Selling to Seniors,” is scheduled to debut in January. Its goal is to provide agents “best practice guidelines” in dealing with members in this investor group, according to Melaine Kimmel, senior vice president of Securities Education at Kaplan Financial.
“The course will focus on fraud perpetrated through a variety of hard-to-resist selling techniques, such as the free lunch seminar, misleading professional designations, email pitches, and other suspicious promotional tactics,” she explained.
This new program updates Kaplan’s Ethics and Senior Investors course, which covered subject matter viewed as crucial by government agencies. “We have created this updated course to sharpen the focus on a topic that has been the focal point of numerous investigations,” said Chuck Lowenstein, a senior securities editor for Kaplan Financial.
It’s not that Kaplan is just guessing that agents need this course. Requests to update the curriculum came from Kaplan’s financial services customers, who want to both train their sales representatives in proper techniques and reduce their compliance risks while promoting and selling to baby boomers and seniors. In fact, some of Kaplan’s clients have provided input for the course.
Other firms see the ethics course as a standalone element in sales training, and some of them are interested in collaborating with Kaplan on developing their own proprietary course, Kimmel said.
The updated training comes at a crucial time for older investors. According to data compiled by the Securities and Exchange Commission in July 2006, three-fourths of America’s consumer assets, valued at $16 trillion, are held by households headed by someone who is at least 50 years old.
At the same time, the SEC, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), and the North American Securities Administrators Association all report that they are hearing from more senior and baby boomer investors who have been subjected to an increasing number of suspicious or fraudulent sales schemes.
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