Using models to ease your transition to a new firm

The first few months after deciding to bring your practice to a new firm is an exciting time but comes with a host of challenges: new support staff, new due-diligence and implementation processes, unfamiliar proprietary trading platforms, and more.

It’s also an opportunity to bring efficiencies and scalability to your practice. For those reasons model portfolios can play an important role in your transition.   

Client retention
Among all that’s new in this period, most advisors will want to focus on keeping their old clients. Vanguard model portfolios allow you to spend less time selecting and explaining fluctuations in individual investments, and more time building client relationships around the things that matter, such as gaining a holistic understanding of client finances. The more time you can spend on clients' entire financial lives, the stronger and longer-lasting those relationships may be, no matter what firm you might partner with.

Retention through coaching
The biggest detractor to portfolio return is often investors’ behavior, especially when they’re anxious about global events, market volatility—or their advisor’s move to a new firm. You add considerable value when you address clients’ concerns and temper their natural human reactions to change and volatility¹. That sort of positive approach, in turn, can build trust, motivate referrals, and drive assets.

Vanguard has a wealth of tools and resources to help you make the most of these behavioral coaching opportunities.

Growing your practice
More than ever, during a period of transition you may feel the need to grow your practice. The time savings gained by using models enable you to take younger clients with wealth accumulation potential, helping you to scale your business and shift resources to help build your practice.

Realizing efficiencies
As you onboard your practice, you’ll find that models are an efficient and empowering alternative to poring over your new firm’s approved product lists and rebuilding the portfolios of existing clients with new investment vehicles. You spend less time on investment selection, due diligence, and administrative tasks. You leverage the insights of some of the world’s leading portfolio construction and management experts through products designed for each client’s unique risk profile. From your firm’s perspective, model portfolios may reduce compliance headaches and administrative overhead.

Vanguard strategic model portfolios provide access to a curated portfolio of market-tested investments, as well as the deep experience and long-term perspective of our portfolio strategists. They offer your clients a host of benefits:

• Broad-market stock and investment-grade² bond exposure.
• Potentially lower return variability and low turnover.
• ETFs for transparency and potential tax efficiency.
• Costs among the industry's lowest.

Learn more about Vanguard model portfolios

1 Francis M. Kinniry Jr., Colleen M. Jaconetti, Michael A. DiJoseph, David J. Walker, and Maria C. Quinn, 2022. Putting a value on your value: Quantifying Vanguard Advisor’s Alpha. Valley Forge, Pa.: The Vanguard Group.

2 A bond whose credit quality is considered to be among the highest by independent bond-rating agencies.

For more information about Vanguard funds and ETFs, visit advisors.vanguard.com to obtain a prospectus or, if available, a summary prospectus. Investment objectives, risks, charges, expenses, and other important information about a fund are contained in the prospectus; read and consider it carefully before investing.

Vanguard ETF Shares are not redeemable with the issuing Fund other than in very large aggregations worth millions of dollars. Instead, investors must buy and sell Vanguard ETF Shares in the secondary market and hold those shares in a brokerage account. In doing so, the investor may incur brokerage commissions and may pay more than net asset value when buying and receive less than net asset value when selling.

All investing is subject to risk, including possible loss of principal.

Investments in bonds are subject to interest rate, credit, and inflation risk.

Be aware that fluctuations in the financial markets and other factors may cause declines in the value of your account. There is no guarantee that any particular asset allocation or mix of funds will meet your investment objectives or provide you with a given level of income.

Vanguard does not, and will not, make any representations about whether a model portfolio is in the best interest of any investor, is not, and will not be, responsible for the determination of whether a model portfolio is in the best interests of any investor, and is not acting as an investment advisor to any investor. It is the investment advisor’s responsibility to determine the appropriateness of the model portfolios, or any of the securities included therein, for any client.

The Vanguard model portfolios are provided for illustrative and educational purposes only. The Vanguard model portfolios do not constitute research, are not personalized investment advice or an investment recommendation from Vanguard to any client of a third party financial professional and are intended for use only by a third party financial professional, with other information, as a resource to help build a portfolio or as an input in the development of investment advice for its own clients. Such financial professionals are responsible for making their own independent judgment as to how to use the Vanguard model portfolios.