The financial industry has grown massively over the past few years. As people seek more financial guidance and support from proven professionals, people in insurance, mortgage, financial planning, and other financial services face massive opportunities for growth. And while these opportunities present themselves openly, we need to be prepared for the upcoming growth.
Studies show that the financial services industry reached a valuation of $20.4 trillion in 2020. This year, that number could grow to roughly $22.5 trillion. More households and individuals are hiring financial advisors, mortgage brokers, and other finance specialists. And as that demand increases, the workload on these professionals tends to increase too.
Growing a finance company or practice, like any business, presents professionals with a double-edged sword. Along with company growth comes a surge in deliverables, meetings, paperwork, onboarding, and other work demands. If professionals and firms aren’t careful, they could be opening a pandora’s box of unresolved issues and clients falling through the cracks.
What then is the best strategy to meet the rising need and grow your finance company? What finance professionals should start looking into is hiring a finance Virtual Assistant to help scale and grow the firm or business.
Why Hire a Finance Virtual Assistant?
We now live in an age where hybrid and virtual work is becoming more of the norm than the exception to the rule. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us that remote work isn’t just possible. It’s beneficial in many aspects. Around 18% of the world’s professionals now work remotely. That number could only grow with time.
What this indicates is that our talent pool will only grow wider. Globalisation and the internet boom have made it possible to work with someone who isn’t in the same room as you. Moreover, working with someone who isn’t even on the same island or time zone as you isn’t far-fetched now either. Hence, the demand and popularity of working with Virtual Assistants have grown too. At Outsourcing Angel, we have seen a particular uptick in the demand for Virtual Assistants amongst financial experts and professionals. People in life insurance, mortgage, real estate, accounting, and other categories in the financial service industry now want to hire virtual staff to help them with their business.
Different Finance Virtual Assistant Specialisations
There has been a massive growth in the population of Virtual Assistants in the financial industry. And as more virtual employees get hired to help mortgage brokers, financial advisors, accountants, bookkeepers, financial analysts, finance coaches and other professionals in finance, more specialisations arise. Let’s look into the varying Virtual Assistant specialisations and how they can bring value to finance professionals.
Mortgage broker Virtual Assistant
A mortgage broker Virtual Assistant can help people in mortgage companies perform various tasks like outbound sales, lead management, client onboarding, document processing, customer service and other tasks. With a Virtual Assistant, mortgage brokers can focus on more high-level and specialised tasks.
Financial advisor Virtual Assistant
A lot of work goes into helping people pick up life insurance, mutual funds, and other investment opportunities. A Virtual Assistant for financial advisors can help keep track of client meetings, provide documentation, follow up on clients, set up financial coaching meetings, handle social media accounts, and so on.
Loan officer Virtual Assistant
A loan officer who works for larger corporations often has to network with real estate industry people and keep up with the company’s growing administrative demands. Having a virtual employee take care of those tasks like newsletter creation, CRM management, and so on is a huge time saver. A misconception is that hiring loan officer Virtual Assistants might become a detriment to the rest of the company’s employees, but there are many cases that show how outsourcing to offshore staff significantly helps your onshore staff in many ways.
Accountant and bookkeeper Virtual Assistant
Hiring a Virtual Assistant for accountants can bring many upsides to an accounting firm, whether small or big. Often starting accounting firms can get bogged down by expensive local administrative assistant costs. Thankfully, in first-world nations, there’s now the option to outsource to a developing country like the Philippines or India and get someone at a much lower rate. That’s because the cost of living in these countries is significantly lower, thus salary requirements aren’t as demanding.
It’s common for professionals in finance, or any industry for that matter, to struggle with the thought of outsourcing. Some have issues with quality and would rather retain more control of the business. But having this mindset isn’t practical if you want to scale. If you want to see your business grow, you’ll have to learn how to trust others to take over certain tasks so you can focus on your core competence.
What mortgage brokers, financial advisors, and many other financial professionals and entrepreneurs must realise is that delegation is a core part of business growth. The more we delegate, the more we’re able to multiply our efforts. The key is to determine which tasks take the most time and least precedence in our business operations and trust those to other professionals who can do it better.
If you’re planning to hire a Virtual Assistant, we would love to provide you all the guidance you need to hire well and hire right. At Outsourcing Angel, we have many years of experience in detecting promising virtual talent and onboarding them in a productive culture and system that sets your virtual employees up for massive success.
To learn more about our foolproof recruitment process and effective Virtual Assistant management processes, and how you can gain access to those services today, book a Discovery Call with us and we’d love to show you how we get things done.
Looking for an experienced and reliable Virtual Assistant?
Our Outsourcing Specialist is here to talk about all your business needs so that we can find you a Virtual Assistant that meets your expectations and fits seamlessly into your business.
Tasks To Outsource to a Finance Virtual Assistant
Now that we know what specialisations a financial Virtual Assistant might have and what kind of finance professionals they can help, let’s look at what kinds of tasks these Virtual Assistants might be able to help with. Here are some tasks to outsource to a VA in finance.
Administrative Tasks
Hiring Virtual Assistants for mortgage brokers, financial advisors, and other finance professionals to do administrative tasks is a growing industry practice nowadays. It’s common for budding finance pros to get overwhelmed and burnt-out by all the administrative work involved in their field. But this doesn’t have to be the case as admin tasks are often easily outsourced and trainable.
Here are some examples of administrative tasks that one can easily offload and give to an assistant:
- Data entry and encoding
- Storing files and client information
- Logging calls and client details
- Creating and sending proposals
- Business correspondence
- Communicating with other employees
- Data research
- Responding to and sending out emails
- Taking meeting minutes
These are just some of the dozens of administrative skills that people in finance can easily outsource to a Virtual Assistant. On top of hiring an assistant to take care of business-related tasks, professionals can also hire a personal finance virtual assistant or personal assistant to also organise one’s out-of-office life. These tasks can include online grocery shopping, personal schedule management, gift sending, and so on.
Calendar and Schedule Management
As professionals grow, they tend to get busier. Tasks, meetings, and other scheduled deliverables can pile up. Simply keeping track of these tasks turns into a significant chore on its own. When financial professionals get to a point that calendar and schedule management becomes a job on its own, it’s time to outsource this aspect of the job to a Virtual Assistant.
Calendar and schedule management tasks can include setting appointments, rescheduling appointments, keeping track of calendared schedules, sending reminders, giving out Zoom links to prospects and clients, and many other calendar and schedule-related activities.
Lead Generation
Running a finance business requires constantly prospecting and finding new leads. Tasks attached to lead generation can be extremely time-consuming. At Outsourcing Angel, we often work with professionals who look for leads on websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, and various listing sites. Looking for leads on these platforms can take significant time.
Assigning these tasks to a Virtual Assistant can help reduce manual lead prospecting. Then once an assistant or team finds these leads, they can put them in a pipeline, which leads to the next set of tasks one can outsource to virtual staff.
Client Relationship Management
Creating a system for client relationship management is a best practice for thriving finance businesses and individuals. This involves bringing prospects through a lead funnel then onboarding them properly as clients. As virtual mortgage and loans processing support increases, for instance, professionals and sales representatives in home loans should start maintaining a CRM system.
A CRM tool is cloud-based, meaning anyone anywhere can update and maintain it. Many Virtual Assistants are well-adept in setting up and running CRM tools so that finance managers and workers can better see each client’s journey. Virtual Assistants can take care of updating client details, keeping track of clients’ onboarding journeys, and responding to any concerns and queries that could arise through the process.
Virtual Events and LMS Management
In life insurance and investment circles, a lot of advisors are starting to use virtual events and webinars to market their policies and planning services. Getting a financial advisor virtual assistant to run virtual events is a route that many are starting to take. A Virtual Assistant can create online event pages on Facebook or Eventbrite, send out invitations, create Zoom links, email participants, create event worksheets and keynote slides, create event programs, run tech for the virtual event and so on.
Some finance coaches have also started creating education programs to better serve clients and create additional income streams. If this is a route you’re looking into, it’s strategic to outsource learning management system setup and maintenance to a Virtual Assistant or team of virtual staff.
Human Resource Tasks
In many cases for finance companies and firms, the principals and owners also act as the human resource manager. A lot of their HR tasks can also be outsourced to virtual staff. These tasks include payroll reports, evaluations, job posting, resume filing, new staff onboarding, and many more.
Social Media and Marketing
Marketing products and services on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram could provide a lot of business growth, but it takes time and effort to create content. Running a social media presence entails creating graphics, writing social media captions, scheduling out social media posts, responding to comments and messages and so on.
These are all tasks you can give to a talented social media Virtual Assistant. One good case scenario we’ve seen in Outsourcing Angel is the steady rise in the demand for a virtual assistant for Australian mortgage brokers to create Facebook pages and groups. These virtual staff create content that gives people tips when getting loans and home mortgages, refinancing, real estate investment market insights and predictions and so on.
Website Management
There has also been a noticeable uptick in getting webmaster virtual assistants to keep company websites updated. Let’s say you’re a mortgage brokering company with an outdated website. There’s a high chance that you’re losing leads and potential customers because the website has the wrong contact information or doesn’t provide any valuable content that builds rapport with website visitors.
A good strategy would be to hire a mortgage broking virtual assistant to create blog posts, develop an email capture funnel, develop email automations, and update company information on the website as needed. Some Virtual Assistants are also highly skilled at creating landing pages and sales pages with drag and drop page builders like Clickfunnels, Shogun, LeadPages, and others.
Ready to transform your business workflow with systemic geniuses and a virtual team?
Book a FREE Discovery Call with our Outsourcing Specialist today and Let’s chat about how we can reduce your manual workload.
Grow Your Finance Business with the Help of a Virtual Assistant
Getting a mortgage broker, financial advisor, loan officer or financial planning virtual assistant provides many benefits to a company. But there’s an overarching benefit to outsourcing administrative and other low-tier tasks to a team. That benefit is company growth.
Entrepreneurs and professionals who outsource might take on extra fixed costs by hiring staff, but this expense often gets offset by the immense growth that comes with making this movie. With more time on their hands, financial experts now have time to get more clients, network, upskill, build partnerships, strategize, and perform other high-level tasks that can provide greater opportunities for themselves or their businesses. If you’re ready to experience such benefits in your business, book a FREE Discovery Call with us today.
