Feature: Part 2 - Father to Family

This is Part 2 of our conversation with Frank Gasper. You can read Feature: Part 1 - Family Harmony here.

We talked with Frank Gasper, owner and financial advisor at CSR Wealth Management, with decades of experience helping people. Frank is an enthusiastic early adopter of new technologies, but he also understands how some folks may feel intimidated by those systems.

In our conversation with Frank, he breaks down for us how he helps his clients realize that technological solutions can benefit them the most.

"At the core, when it comes to “the financial services business and working with individual clients, what we're doing is estate planning right from day one. When we take on a client, we talk to them about their education plan for their child, and then, at some point, will be talking about their estate plan and then transitioning those assets to their family,” says Frank.

To him, the beauty of the collaboration is that advisors can set levels of connection with family members and encourage families to have this level of transparency, so that down the line, there aren't problems within family units.

From Father to Family

“Another example is a client I recently acquired. The gentleman was a little bit older and had some health concerns, so I contacted him and his son, who was also a client in the book. I went over everything with him - setting up the SideDrawers so that I could gather the information for the father. The son looked after everything and I suggested to him that we start populating his father’s data, tax returns and all his investments and properties, wills, etc.”

“Unfortunately shortly after, the dad went to hospital and was not able to get through the difficult situation. Thankfully the sons had helped gather the wills and POAs earlier and were able to create the trust quickly. But unfortunately he passed, and considering we had a lot of the data already populated, the flow of information helped facilitate things so much through this difficult period for the family.”

And because the process was so smooth, Frank is now working not only with the son, but also their spouse, and planning for them, and he’s also onboarding another son of this client.

This example perfectly illustrates the value that advisors bring to clients. Ultimately, it’s not about the money or even the technology, it’s about getting the client into a better situation.

And with collaboration, advisors can not only help out clients, but also look at the opportunity for extended family and children being able to continue to access the information. Keeping the dialogue open with all the units of the family, and allowing them to keep all the key documents of the various stages of their lives in one place – whether we are talking school records, RESPs, TFSAs, mortgages, birth and death certificates, wills, etc, is so helpful when a major illness or death of a family member occurs. Record keeping is as easy as scanning a document and putting it SideDrawer, where it's going to live securely. It doesn't have to be moved ever again.

According to Frank…

Having a secured digital vault where we can collaborate for your sensitive data, your driver's license, your social insurance numbers, any of the applications that we fill out, that no one wants to send through email, gives clients that level of confidence that you have a really reputable firm who's caring deeply about how we manage your data.
Working within independent channels as advisors do, and competing directly with the banks and their secure mailboxes, it is key to understand that all the emails that go back and forth to gather client information are not only very cumbersome and hard to manage, but also can be a risk for the protection of the client’s data.
Sidedrawer provides that level of facilitation without the downsides of email. It also makes life easier for everybody involved, especially when it comes to lawyers, accountants, bankers, and other professionals working with the client.
This is a tool that helps with engagement, but at the same time, not every client is welcoming of a new password. I advise that you use this platform for everything and it'll slowly make life way easier as opposed to being more difficult.
When you see stories in media about law offices getting hacked and emails getting hacked, and when you see the proliferation of emails that are either phishing scam or a pure and outright attempt to get into my system, it is very concerning. If you have a large organization where you have multiple endpoints where anybody can access the wrong the wrong link and bring the whole system down, it is such a huge risk for client information.