Adviser clients largely calm through Covid storm
Advisers say they are dealing with only a small number of inquiries about coronavirus-related market disruption – but that may be because of the work already put in on educating clients.
Thursday, March 19th 2020, 6:10AM 
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Jordi Garcia, of New Zealand Financial Planning, said he had received “less than a handful” of inquires from clients who were worried about what was happening.
“But I have been out there contacting them, bringing them back to what it is they are trying to achieve.”
He said he was able to keep anxiety at bay, but a large number of his clients were retired and were reliant on their investment portfolios to deliver their standard of living. “To date it’s not a big issue, it’s happened very fast. I suspect going forward things will get worse. People can take a 5, 6, 7 or even 10% drop but if it keeps going for three, four, five or six months that’s when it gets difficult and fear sets in.”
He was encouraging clients who were not retired to make the most of the buying opportunities in the market. “I’ve had three calls from clients with KiwiSaver asking if they would be better to move to a more defensive fund and I’ve said ‘if you want to shoot yourself in the foot, that’s a good way to do it’.”
Tim Fairbrother, founder of Rival Wealth, said he had had a small number of queries.
“We have tried to keep investors educated that these events are always possible and markets recover.”
Susanna Stuart, co-founder of Stuart and Carlyon, said she had not had many clients phoning worried, but her firm had sent an email to clients to inform them of what was happening.
It told them that global virus outbreaks had happened before and share markets recovered eventually.
Stuart and Carlyon was monitoring the performance of each investment fund in clients’ portfolios.
“For those adding money or in the implementation stage of a new portfolio, we’re rescheduling tranches to take advantage of the current lower prices … with every negative there is a positive.”
Tony Dench, chief executive of Share, said investment advisers could talk about what was happening in markets but insurance advisers were fielding queries about redundancy cover, too.
He said advisers he dealt with, who were independent business-people themselves, had concerns about their own operations as well as taking care of clients.
Maintaining open communication with clients was the right approach, he said. “To make sure they are as informed as they can be and know the adviser is there for queries and questions, and claims if need be.”
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