Then I got another life insurance policy from All Asia Life, from an agent who was my college barkada. But that didn't pan out well either because All Asia Life went bankrupt. Apparently, they were not up front about the type of investments they were making with clients’ money. Again, that meant the demise of my life insurance policy.
These two incidents proved to me what my Financial Advisor Sasha So Seng Yu likes to say: that she values the trust of the client more than anything. And trust really is what business is all about.
In the world of financial institutions, it is hard to survive because there are so many companies fighting it out for the trust of clients/customers. In life insurance alone, you will find many players that all claim to be the best insurance providers. Not surprisingly, many people who are interested in getting a financial product like life insurance rely on word-of-mouth endorsements from people who have already had a good experience buying life insurance from a particular company before. After all, these people who endorse a particular company are already satisfied with the level of service and honesty of their chosen agent/financial advisor. So that is good news for that agent/financial advisor. But it is also good news for those potential prospects because they can rely on the feedback of their friends/relatives/colleagues/business partners when selecting financial products to buy.
The flipside of that coin is that when an agent/financial advisor does something to offend the client that valuable trust can disappear in a second. Like I said, when my first agent committed estafa I lost my trust in her. One of my mentors in business made it a point to tell me “clients/customers will buy YOU before they buy what you are selling.” So if you go into selling financial products, you need to have a blemish-free reputation and so does the company that you represent.
Trust is also important when an agent/financial advisor accepts a prospect as a client. This means the agent/financial advisor also has to check out the prospect if he/she is also trustworthy because the agent/financial advisor wants to avoid creating problems for herself and for the company she represents. I guess you can say that the agent/financial advisor needs to be good at reading people. Even if the prospect has enough money to pay for the financial product, there may be times when an agent/financial advisor has to turn down a prospect because she can sense that there is something not quite right with that prospect. Better safe than sorry.
This is why financial institutions make it a point to safeguard their image in the world of business. Because even a small incident brought about by being dishonest can tarnish their image, sometimes permanently. Since agents/financial advisors represent the company, it is equally important that they too have a sterling reputation that is free from even a hint of dishonesty.
That is why when I found out that Sasha, my current Financial Advisor, was selling financial products I decided that I could trust her with my money. She was my friend first before she became my Sunlife Financial Advisor. You can say that I “bought her” before I bought her financial product. I told her that I was trusting her because she was consistently honest with me on all levels. So that is good for both of us, because I get to invest my money through a trustworthy Financial Advisor and she gets a new client (me) which is good for her business. If she and I are able to foster that trust over time, then that creates a good business relationship that benefits both of us. And that, in a nutshell, is how an ideal business relationship can and should be actually over time.
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