Client experience
Most client reporting is built to demonstrate thoroughness. The evidence that nobody reads it is sitting in your own inbox.
Most client reporting is produced to demonstrate thoroughness rather than to be read. It runs to dozens of pages, leads with holdings, and buries the two things the client wanted in an appendix.
The evidence is in your own inbox. If clients read these packages, they would ask questions about them. Mostly they do not, which tells you what happened to it.
Three things, in this order:
How much do I have? One number, prominent, on the first page. Not a table of accounts they have to add up.
Is that more or less than last time, and why? The change, separated into what they contributed or withdrew and what the market did. Clients routinely conflate the two and then draw the wrong conclusion about their own progress.
Am I going to be all right? The question the report almost never answers, because it reports on a portfolio rather than on a plan.
Holdings detail on page one. It is the least interpretable content in the package and it occupies the position of highest attention. Put it at the back for the clients who want it, and they will find it.
Benchmarks the client cannot relate to their own goals. Comparing a conservative allocation to a broad equity index produces a number that is accurate and actively unhelpful.
Anything that requires you to be in the room to explain. If a page only works with narration, it does not work — it is a slide from a meeting that ended up in a document.
A short written summary at the front, in sentences. What changed, what you did, what you are watching. Six lines. This is the part clients read and the part almost no firm includes, because it cannot be generated automatically and somebody has to write it.
Progress against the plan rather than against the market — are they still on course for the thing the money is for.
What you did on their behalf since last time. The rebalance, the harvested loss and what it saved, the fee tier they crossed. Invisible work stays invisible unless it is written down.
The reason most reporting is bad is rarely design. It is that assembling it is expensive, so it is produced once a quarter by whoever has the time, from data that has to be reconciled first.
Firms that report well have usually solved the operational problem rather than the design one. When the numbers come from one place and are correct by default, the package stops being an event.
Send your last quarterly to someone intelligent who is not in this industry — a friend, your brother-in-law — and ask them to tell you how the client did and whether they are on track.
Time how long it takes. If they cannot answer in ninety seconds, your clients are not answering it either. They are just not telling you.
Questions this did not answer? Ask them directly — that is what the twenty minutes is for.
Book 20 minutes with Kyle