Advisors ranked their five responses on a scale of 1-5, with 1 representing the least amount of time and 5 representing the most. Responses for each activity were then averaged for the purposes of presentation. Client meetings/service and portfolio management remain, as one would expect, the activities on which advisors spend the most time, with average scores of 3.7 and 3.5, respectively. Client acquisition, research and business strategy are also high priority activities for RIAs, registering responses in the 3.0 – 3.2 range. This is reflective of the key drivers of RIA business in a competitive marketplace in which competitors focus on building their book of business and developing compelling investment theses to deliver superior risk-adjusted returns to clients. These five most time-consuming activities are also consistent with the top objectives displayed in Figure 1. Other activities that require a meaningful amount of time include education, administration and marketing. Overall, these results are very consistent with outsourced functions in Figure 4 and demonstrate that RIAs have a keen focus on the core areas of their business while they limit the amount of time they spend on secondary activities such as trading, back-office operations and training.
Next Part 6 of 7: Number of Custody/Clearing Firms
