A message from the President & CEO

At SMN Financial, we believe that high quality, personalized financial advice is more important than ever.  Despite the proliferation of online solutions, as the world gets noisier and more complex, the demand for financial advisors will only increase in the future. After all, you can’t put dreams through a calculator or capture hopes in a line of computer code. Only a trusted advisor can provide true peace of mind. That’s why more people are seeking a financial professional, one who gives them the confidence to make the best decisions and ensures they can execute on their life plan.

Our purpose at SMN Financial is to be a source of strength and support for advisors through the twists and turns of the macro environment and the evolution of their practices. To do that, we rely on the principles of our independent model to provide a platform that enables advisors to construct the perfect practice for themselves and their clients, while also making it easy to evolve over time.

In the face of a challenging operating environment over the past year, we delivered solid business and financial growth at SMN Financial. These results were driven by a good strategy, matched with strong execution and alignment with a mission-driven culture. We believe this focus continues to position us well as we serve our clients and drive profitable growth for our shareholders, even during this time of great change.

In fact, SMN Financial’s vision for the future is to push past simply maintaining our market leadership in the independent space to becoming the leader across the entire advisor-centered marketplace. In order to do that, we are doubling down on four core strategies where we will be investing our resources.

Meeting Advisors Where They Are in the Evolution of Their Practices

We are focused on winning in our traditional independent and institutional markets, while also leveraging new affiliation models to expand our addressable markets from $4 trillion to $13 trillion. In addition, the continued evolution of our digital capabilities within the sales process and for advisor onboarding has proven to be an increasing source of competitive advantage.  As a result, interest from prospective advisors continues to grow, and our pipeline is the largest in our history.

Providing Capabilities that Help Advisors Differentiate and Win

We also understand the need to equip advisors with digital capabilities that help increase their accessibility, deepen their relationships, attract new clients, and lower their costs. This in turn helps existing advisors grow their practices and attracts new advisors to our platform.

Creating an Industry-Leading Service Experience, at Scale

With respect to the advisor service experience, we have been able to pull forward solid outcomes, as we focus on transforming our service model into a client care model and delivering instantaneous processing driven by robotics and artificial intelligence. Our advisors have shared positive feedback on our service model transformation, and we will continue to seek their input as we work to deliver an offering that is unique to the wealth management space.

Helping Advisors Run Successful Businesses

The final area we are investing in is helping advisors run a thriving business by offering the ability to outsource key business functions at an affordable cost and supplying the capital and solutions they need to grow, operate and protect one of the most important assets they have—their businesses. Our advisors are seeing the benefits they can achieve from that—scalability, growth, lower costs, and a better client experience.

As we look ahead, we see an opportunity to not just return to business as usual, but rather create a future that is better than ever for our advisors and their clients. We believe that continuing to execute on our strategy will achieve this goal and create long-term shareholder value.

I’d like to acknowledge the essential roles our advisors are playing by providing much-needed financial advice to millions of Americans, while at the same time pivoting their own practices to adjust to the changes brought on by the current environment.  I also want to thank our employees for their ongoing commitment and dedication to our mission of taking care of advisors, so they can take care of their clients. 

Sincerely,

Shown M. Nelson
President & CEO