Key Takeaways
Quility, an award-winning insurtech company, offers affordable, customized insurance solutions while giving their national network of agents best-in-class tech to connect clients with their best-fit policy. Quility’s new products, technology and platforms are shaping the future of the insurance industry.
As of May 2022, a Gallup poll found that the percentage of Americans who own stock has steadily dropped since 1998. While recent years have seen a small uptick, at the time of the poll only 58% of Americans owned stock. The same poll also found that stock ownership has a strong correlation with household income, formal education, age and race. They found that households earning less than $40,000 annually only made up 25% of Americans with investments.
Cue Quility Financial Advisors (QFA), powered by Solomon API. This digital platform is helping middle America with advanced financial planning resources that were formerly only an option for high-net-worth clients. Backed by a team of fiduciaries, QFA leverages algorithmic technology to manage retirement and investment funds for clients of all economic backgrounds.
In alignment with Quility’s agent force, via Symmetry Financial Group, QFA is helping clients find the right investment vehicle while generating passive income for Symmetry agents. It’s efforts like these that push the insurtech space forward while providing new ways to support agents and clients alike.
Backed by a team of fiduciaries, Quility Financial Advisors leverages algorithmic technology to manage retirement and investment funds for clients of all economic backgrounds.
What is a fiduciary?
Every advisor with Quility Financial Advisors is a fiduciary. As fiduciaries, their service is to prioritize the financial goals of the client above all else. More than that, fiduciaries must make financial choices for clients that are solely in the interest of them and their beneficiaries. As such, every choice they help clients make needs to adhere to a couple of principles of conduct.
As fiduciaries, advisors with QFA prioritize the client’s financial goals and help find ways to maximize their investments. These priorities can be broken down into two key duties — a duty of loyalty and a duty of care.
These priorities can be broken down into two key duties — a duty of loyalty and a duty of care.
Under the duty of care, fiduciaries make informed decisions in handling the clients’ investments and help make critical choices in how those investments are split up and handled. Quility Financial Advisors do this by having access to a suite of products and technology created by Quility.
Second, under the duty of loyalty, fiduciaries are obligated to avoid any undisclosed economic or personal conflict of interest. All fiduciaries are bound to use their guidance without furthering any private interests. With that in mind, they must disclose any recommendations they receive a commission on.
These requirements remain constant for fiduciaries in any money management position, including advisors with QFA.
Who can become a fiduciary?
Ultimately, becoming someone’s fiduciary comes down to trust. Trust that they will only act on behalf of the client’s best interest and trust that they will manage both money and property carefully.
Once that trust has been established, most anyone can act as a fiduciary for someone else. Normally, this will involve someone becoming a power of attorney to have more autonomy over the person’s finances, but guardians of property and trustees can also act as fiduciaries.
While a family or friend can act as fiduciary, having an established professional handle your finances eliminates a lot of the pitfalls that come with this kind of responsibility. Regardless, once a fiduciary, it’s important to keep a few things in mind when handling someone else’s finances.
Act only in their best interest
Similar to the duty of loyalty, fiduciaries must make choices that will benefit the client above all else. The fiduciary should never make a choice for the client that is designed solely to bring them personal gain.
Make careful financial choices
The name of the game for fiduciaries is fewer risks and less loss. They are responsible for finding smart investments and product choices that mitigate losses and continue to grow the client’s wealth.
Keep all finances separate
Probably an obvious entry, the fiduciary must not mix the client’s money or property with their own. This is more of an issue when having a friend or family member act as fiduciary. Mixing assets will undoubtedly lead to trouble later.
Keep true and complete records
As the fiduciary, keeping records is crucial to managing someone else’s finances. Not only does it promote better opportunities for growth, but it will also help clear up any future questions of misconduct on behalf of the advisor.
How agents and fiduciaries work together
The beauty behind Quility Financial Advisors is how they align with Symmetry Financial Group’s nationwide network of agents. Together, the client’s advisor and the agent will work together to keep them, and their family, covered from start to finish. Ideally, the agent will find the client’s need, and the fiduciary can help discover the right vehicle to fit that need.
With this kind of synchronicity, QFA’s clients are supported by a one-of-a-kind buying experience. They are guided by the agent to products that can fit their unique needs while an advisor ensures their investments and assets are working to create a passive income. Beyond that, between the two specialists, they’re sure to find any gaps in coverage, investment opportunities and affordable policies.
Splits on commissions
QFA is a huge benefit to agents and advisors alike. Not only are they helping clients find the best products and investment vehicles, but by working together they’re building a passive income for one another. Principally, as advisors help agents’ clients find ways to build assets and life insurance products, both parties receive a percentage of the commission on that sale. All commissions between the advisors and agents will be split. Both will receive 80% of the application for annuities under $250k, 70% for annuities between $250k and $750k and a 60% application split for any annuities written above $750k.
Having a trusted advisor is key in the client’s journey to grow wealth and keep their loved ones financially protected.
Any assets under management by the advisor will be attached to the agent. Whenever those assets are suited to become an annuity, the agent will see that same 60, 70 or 80% split. This becomes a lifetime benefit for the attached agent as any money being managed by QFA will ultimately result in a payout.
Beyond that, any life insurance products sold will see a 60/40 split between the advisor and the agent.
With QFA, agents and fiduciaries alike are helping one another cover the client while building a passive income that will continue to grow with every successful application. The two specialists truly work together to support the client and one another.
How Quility Financial Advisors works
Quility Financial Advisors operates with a unique mission of providing fiduciary services to clients who haven’t traditionally had access to financial planning and management. With Quility-powered technology and support, QFA fiduciaries can help middle-American families build generational wealth and ultimately gain financial freedom.
QFA leverages algorithmic technology (which uses more data points than traditional money managers) to provide inclusive investment strategies to everyday families. This is what sets them apart from traditional fiduciary services — a drive to establish a lower financial barrier of entry for clients and their families. Quility Financial Advisors combine their portfolio intellect with safe and logical approaches to help clients get the most out of their financial investments.
QFA leverages algorithmic technology to provide inclusive investment strategies to everyday families.
Beyond that, Quility Financial Advisors partners with Quility’s nationwide network of agents to help fill in these financial gaps for their clients. Through this partnership, clients receive an end-to-end purchasing experience. The agent outfits them with a product that suits their financial needs, while the advisor builds on that relationship with long-lasting guidance toward their financial goals.
The agent helps find the products, while the advisor builds trust by protecting their assets and making investment strategies. What’s more, Quility Financial Advisors offer financial education to all clients to help them feel confident in their financial plans.
Reduce the wealth gap
Income and wealth inequality is the worst it’s been in the last hundred years. In the U.S. an estimated 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%. Middle America is struggling to build wealth for their family and half of older Americans don’t have a savings at all.
With this kind of economic disparity, families with less are seeing fewer opportunities to invest and save for things like retirement and final expenses. A survey by Investopedia found that most millennials are more concerned with paying off and managing debts than retirement.
Quility Financial Advisors is a direct response to the growing wealth inequality. It is designed to help more families find financial freedom (and growth) who previously did not have access to fiduciary services.
Initiatives like QFA are helping fill in the wealth gap in Middle America. By offering these non-traditional clients access to products, investments and services, they can help these families build wealth and save for retirement.
Protecting those investments is crucial to the success of reaching financial goals and ultimately securing retirement. A lasting relationship with one of the advisors from QFA will support the client with continued service and financial guidance. As the client’s needs grow the QFA fiduciary can help find new solutions to meet their goals.
Client education
As is true with most things, knowledge is power. Arguably one of the greatest strengths that come with Quility Financial Advisors is client education. QFA’s fiduciaries are there to guide clients through their choices and educate clients on how every investment and product works. The benefit of this strategy is two-fold.
First, clients gain an understanding of how every choice the fiduciary makes works toward their larger financial goals.
Detailing how certain products help protect their assets or how a particular investment opportunity makes more sense in the client’s case helps them stay informed about their finances.
Second, client education fosters a level of transparency that is crucial to the success of the fiduciary. A level of trust is important between the advisor and client, and through education, that trust can be built upon over the course of their relationship.
This kind of education keeps the clients up to date on their financial goals while generating more opportunities to expand their portfolio on part of the fiduciary. While the choices, products and strategies the advisor deploys are a huge part of their service, the education behind them is what makes the relationship between client and fiduciary successful.
Products Quility Financial Advisors will work with
Through Quility Financial Advisors, clients will have access to a full range of customizable products. Advisors will base offerings on the client’s financial well-being, needs and goals to mitigate loss and maximize investment success.
Through an algorithmic data-driven approach, QFA advisors can provide their clients with everything from retirement solutions to debt elimination products. More importantly, by working with a QFA fiduciary, clients will receive guidance that helps them understand each product and how it will help them achieve their financial goals. Ideally, clients will receive guidance on products that help them reach all their financial milestones.
Reaching financial goals
There are life insurance products or investment options for all of life’s milestones, and it’s the role of the QFA advisor to define those options. Advisors can help clients find tax-free retirement solutions through asset management or investments designed to build wealth. Their offerings will differ depending on the client’s age and financial situation, and they can guide the client towards the best fit retirement plan.
Advisors with QFA also specialize in asset protection as well as loss mitigation. One of their chief goals is to generate more wealth for the client without unnecessary risk or loss of investment. They take a safe approach to handling the client’s finances while making smart investment choices to keep the momentum moving forward.
There are life insurance products or investment options for all of life’s milestones, and it’s the role of the QFA advisor to define those options.
Through portfolio management, QFA team members can keep a finger on the pulse of the client’s products, investments and assets. Here they’re able to make educated choices on behalf of the client — deciding where funds can be better spent and when a particular life insurance product makes more sense than another during that period of a client’s life.
Finally, fiduciaries with QFA can help clients eliminate any existing debt. By using a litany of resources, from investments to debt-specific life insurance products, they’re able to help clients tackle debt so that they can focus on building wealth for retirement and meeting financial goals.
Experience the Symmetry difference
Eliminating debt and building wealth are opportunities that haven’t been available to most people. When it comes to paying bills, protecting assets and saving for retirement, it’s nice to have a trusted expert to ensure you’re making the best decisions. With the help of a fiduciary, clients can leverage the financial experience that they don’t always have the personal time to develop themselves.
With Quility Financial Advisors, clients receive a thorough purchasing experience from both agent and fiduciary. Not only are the clients covered from one end to the other, but both the advisors and agents are developing a passive income that would not be possible otherwise.
Quility Financial Advisors is a testament to the progress that Symmetry Financial Group (and Quility) have made in the insurtech space. This new platform is tailored to help build generational wealth for middle America while supporting agents with expert guidance from its advisors. They are reimagining the relationships that clients have with their financial advisors while developing new ways to support their agents.
With Quility Financial Advisors, clients receive a thorough purchasing experience from both agent and fiduciary.
Quility Financial Advisors is a testament to the progress that Symmetry Financial Group (and Quility) have made in the insurtech space. This new platform is tailored to help build generational wealth for middle America while supporting agents with expert guidance from its advisors. They are reimagining the relationships that clients have with their financial advisors while developing new ways to support their agents.
Symmetry Financial Group agents have access to high-quality life insurance, disability income insurance, critical illness insurance and annuity products from more than 30 well-known insurance companies. This gives you the flexibility and reach you need to tailor plans to meet clients’ individual coverage needs.
To learn more about how to begin a fulfilling career as a life insurance agent, contact us today.
Disclaimer
API Financial Advisors dba Quility Financial Advisors is a Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) registered investment advisor and only transacts business in states where it is licensed to do so or exempt from registration. Please note that registration with the SEC does not denote a particular level of skill of the advisor or imply an endorsement by the SEC. All information provided herein is intended to be general in nature and does not represent personal financial advice. This article is not a solicitation or an offer to invest in or purchase any product or service. All investment involves risk of loss. Not FDIC insured or guaranteed by any governmental agency or organization.
Quility Financial Advisors is a registered investment adviser. Registration of an investment adviser does not imply any level of skill or training. Additional information about Quility Financial Advisors is available on the SEC’s website www.adviserinfo.sec.gov. You can search this site by a unique identifying number, known as a CRD number. Quility Financial Advisors’ CRD number is 304586.
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Citations
Lydia Saad and Jeffrey M. Jones. “What Percentage of Americans Own Stock?” Gallup.com, Gallup, 28 Dec. 2022, https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-owns-stock.aspx.
Mahdawi, Arwa. “The US Has a Ruling Class – and Americans Must Stand up to It .” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 2 Sept. 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/02/the-us-has-a-ruling-class-and-americans-must-stand-up-to-it.
Reiff, Nathan. “Multigenerational Survey Shows How Retirement Planning Is Changing.” Investopedia, Investopedia, 19 July 2022, https://www.investopedia.com/how-retirement-planning-is-changing-5224176.
“What Is a Fiduciary?” Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 05 Aug. 2016, https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/what-is-a-fiduciary-en-1769/.“
