Financial planners measure results over decades rather than months. They don't stake all their customers' assets on death-or-glory tilts at fortune. Volatile temperaments are likely to be a poor fit with a world where it is more important to make sure university fees can be paid and retirement afforded than to beat the system. And that is why Manulife Hong Kong have won the Best Practitioner Award in the SCMP/IFPHK Financial Planner Awards for the fourth straight year.
Manulife won because they demonstrated that they understand how to win a marathon, as opposed to a sprint.
Manulife's Hong Kong Financial Planning Agency has achieved something remarkable: in the world that favours the anonymous, they stand out from the crowd.
'We have better, and more thorough training than many of our competitors', says Alan Ng, vice-president at Manulife's Hong Kong Financial Planning Agency. 'Most insurance companies only provide a week or so of initial training to new agents. We have a comprehensive programme called FPDP (the Financial Planning Development Programme) which is a year-long commitment to help our agents develop their financial planning skills.'
This long-established investment in training has both helped create the best financial planners and then attracted the best candidates for successive intakes.
'We have an agency culture to become the most professional agency force in Hong Kong. This also means we are in a better position to motivate our agency to participate in the awards and to learn from it through the process,' says Ng.
