The purpose of this paper is to examine which individual traits of financial advisors influence portfolio transfer speed when a financial advisor recommends investors to migrate to a new financial intermediary.
With reference to the years 2014–2016, one of the three leading Italian tied-agent banks provided the authors with an exclusive and unique data set containing information regarding the financial advisors who had become tied agents, transferring their existing portfolios from their previous banks (traditional or tied-agent banks). The authors observed the ability of the migrant financial advisor in successfully transferring the entire portfolio declared within 12 months of observation. To investigate empirically which personal traits of financial advisors determine their success in the rapid transfer of clients’ portfolios to a new financial intermediary, the authors applied a Cox proportional hazards model.
The authors find that factors such as age, type of bank of origin and size of the managed financial portfolio positively affect the speed transfer.
The obtained results may be interesting for guiding recruiting policies of financial intermediaries.
Regulators should closely examine the phenomenon analyzed in this paper to avoid conflict of interests.
The literature on this topic is scarce, mainly due to the lack of available data. This paper represents an original contribution to open a new field of research.
