The Digital Future
The financial advisers have always remained hesitant when it came to digital platforms; this was a result of targeting an older demographic. However, the focus has changed now which has brought a change.
Sillitoe also backed the idea that times are changing and a change in strategy is an absolute must.
“More and more advisers and firms are finally waking up to the world of digital, thankfully at the expense of cold calling.
“With just a couple of exceptions, I feel that many firms are pretty hopeless at marketing themselves; this is because they don’t allocate much budget to digital and have very few controls in place to manage what their advisers actually post.
“What’s rather frustrating is that some of the best advisory firms at digital marketing are unregulated.
“I guess this is because these firms don’t have the same running costs as a firm regulated by the Insurance Authority or [Securities and Commodities Authority (SCA)]; they certainly have no need to put down any capital.
“In my opinion, unregulated firms in the UAE should be banned from doing any digital marketing or advertising, even if they are regulated by the [Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)] or another regulator in a different part of the world,” he added.
In order to be eligible to participate in the Instagram campaign initiative, advisers need to work for a regulated firm in the UAE; be qualified to a minimum Level 4 or equivalent; have to be a member of a professional body – such as the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) or the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (CISI); and their company needs to be listed on Insight Discovery’s aggregator website.
