Wendy Brookhouse, founder and Chief strategist of Black Star Wealth, outlined practices to help firms survive the COVID-19 crisis.
During a webinar broadcast on Alan Hoffman’s CE-Credits platform, the Nova Scotia advisor paints a picture of advisors’ future. Robo-advisors are not a threat, she says.
“We are in the perfect storm. Markets are down, oil is going down… and now we have social distancing on our hands. We are being forced to adapt. Is the robo-advisor the way of future? Well, yes and no. Sometimes, when we think of financial advising, we think of robo-advising. Nothing can be further from the truth. This guy is never going to replace our role of financial advisor,” Brookhouse says, referring to solutions like Wealthsimple.
Black Star Wealth operates virtually, but does not use robo-advisors. Brookhouse uses appointment making tools offered by OnceHub, namely ScheduleOnce and InviteOnce. Like Doodle, interaction between the two OnceHub tools lets users set meetings according to the availability of each party. Clients are automatically invited to make an appointment at their convenience. These tools simplify the scheduling and avoid double booking of time slots, Brookhouse explains.
For secure document sharing, she uses ExaVault. This white label vault provides Black Star with a dedicated server with its own Web address, which can bear its company logo. Customer presentations take place by videoconference.
Zoom… and its glitches
Brookhouse also uses Zoom. This program lets her back her words with images. To placate jittery investors, she displays a chart on-screen that shows the effect of the five best market days on the return in a given period.
While she has noticed issues with Zoom, she also spotted the fixes the company has made, so opted to continue using this videoconference platform despite its flaws.
“We researched other alternatives and also evaluated all the changes that Zoom subsequently made and communicated with their users. We made the decision to stay with Zoom because of the changes they made, like being able to choose where our data was able to be routed.”
What’s more, Black Star Wealth chose the North American option for Zoom and reinforced security through unique identifiers and passwords, among other measures.
