Written by Michael Aitken, Founder and Chairman, Magus Wealth
This year’s GAIA Annual Conference and Study Tour are being held in Germany (Berlin and Munich) and Sweden (Stockholm). It follows the very successful conference and study tour in Canada last year.
This year’s theme
All GAIA firms are leaders in their local markets, so it will not come as a surprise to hear the theme for September’s conference and study tour is about looking proactively to the future. With unprecedented technological change sweeping across the world, GAIA firms will explore what the future holds in terms of client expectations, demographic change, wealth transfer, technology, and human resourcing.
We recognise that the world is becoming more complex. With the rise of AI, we want to continue to provide client intimacy – our businesses are still very much people centric, but we need to stay relevant and commercially viable by leveraging new technology. Our focus needs to be on how we can coach, lead, and inspire clients to live their best lives while building a sustainable and nurturing culture in service of our teams.
Our thinking on these issues today will position our firms for the future.
The activities
Attending this year’s conference will be 27 business leaders, representing 19 wealth management firms, from 9 countries across the globe.
Activities are divided into two parts: the first is a study tour visiting 4 financial services businesses in Berlin, Munich, and Stockholm. This is followed by a 3-day conference, held in Stockholm, starting Sunday 10th September.
The study tour
This will take place over three days, and 12 GAIA firms will have the opportunity to visit the forward-thinking and innovative Quirin Privatbank AG in Berlin. Then on to Munich to meet Gerd Kommer, CEO of Gerd Kommer Invest, who manage the assets of high-net-worth individuals and families.
We then fly to Stockholm and spend the morning with AP7, the state alternative to the private investment funds offered within the Swedish premium pension system. We end the study tour visiting Lyra Financial Wealth, who have been active in the Swedish market since 2016 providing a “personal CEO” service to over 70 families.
Each firm will give us unfettered access to its operating practices and freely share their successes and challenges. These visits give GAIA firms a fantastic opportunity to get under the skin of how these firms work, understand their best practices and their unique abilities. We are extremely grateful to these firms for making time for us to visit them.
The conference
The main event, the GAIA Conference, is being hosted by Sara Clason of Lyra Financial Wealth. There’s an action-packed agenda with the audience being given the opportunity to hear eight fascinating subjects covering the main themes of Future, Culture, and Digital.
Day One – Future
- Time for Optimism (Stefan Hyttfor): How do we position our business or the future…if we can’t predict it, we need to create it.
- Guiding Advisors to Success – A career path story (J.D. Bruce): We will learn how to measure advisor capacity and use that knowledge to plan for growth.
- Mastering the Profit Equation: Unlocking Double the Client Value and Profits in Your Financial Advisory Practice (Spenser Segal, Actifi): An immersive workshop where we will delve into the strategies and tactics that can help us revolutionise our financial advisory practices.
- Exponential Climate Solutions: This session will arm us with tools for developing our own exponential climate solutions and sustainable companies. Enabling us to have a truly positive impact, on people and the planet.
Day Two – Culture
- How To Build a Human-Centric Wealth Culture (Neil Bage, Shaping Wealth): Neil will deliver an original and impactful framework for wealth advisory firms to build a human-centric culture.
- Nurturing company culture for success (Gail Harrison & Dr Will Holden, Sewells): During the session, we will compare ourselves against other members within GAIA, to share best practices and learn from each other, so we leave the conference with clarity on our next steps. The goal of this session is to motivate us all to take action to improve our firm’s culture, engagement, and ultimately our performance results.
Day 3 – Digital
- Using social security numbers to look at how people invest and how we think about using data. (Professor Paolo Sodini, Professor of Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics): In this session, Professor Sodini will contrast the implications of optimal portfolio theory.
- The Future of the Professions (Dr. Daniel Susskind): Dr. Susskind explores two futures for the professions, drawing on his best-selling books, The Future of the Professions (2015;2022) and A World Without Work (2020). In this pragmatic and optimistic talk, he explains why and sets out how we can all prepare to flourish in decades to come.
The conference closes mid-afternoon on Wednesday 13th September with delegates heading back home with a clear eye upon the future; being ready to innovate their practices and inspire their teams to raise the bar even further and continue to deliver the highest quality advice and service to their clients.
