Healthy wealth management

THE term “wealth management” came about in the 1990s to describe a complex series of services similar to financial planning. The phrase has also been adopted by accountants, estate planners, lawyers and some finance specialists. These experts cater mostly to high-net-worth clients.

Rather than just perceiving wealth as product of a toil-and-reap process, money can be considered a tool with which you can gain profit

Instead of just spending your money, invest it wisely to get returns.

Unlike professions such as accountancy, taxation or auditing, which involve specialised fields of study where professionals are provided official certifications by governing bodies who supervise the field, wealth managers are yet to require official certifications.

However, the Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA), the governing body that awards the CIMA certification (Certified Investment Management Analyst), began offering a certification for wealth management in 2007 known as the Certified Private Wealth Advisor (CPWA).

The certification recognises individuals who specialise in the life cycle of wealth – accumulation, preservation and protection and distribution.

They identify and analyse challenges faced by high-networth clients and how to develop specific strategies to minimise taxes, monetise and protect assets, maximise growth and transfer wealth.

What is wealth management?

Wealth management is a system that involves the effort of both experts and clients to design and adopt ideas to manage and grow the clients’ wealth.

Wealth comes in many different forms – hard cash, properties, shares, luxury items, businesses, lands and others.

Managing it, however, involves collective consultative processes that build a specific portfolio for owners. It is a slow and painstaking process that requires the clients’ trust and the consultants’ patience.

Deciding to involve a wealth manager in planning your finances is an important step.

It requires you to entrust the management of your wealth to someone else.

However, leaving your wealth to stagnate or deplete would be less desirable but this is most likely the case for most people.

What wealth managers do is enhance wealth while providing a valued experience for clients. In addition to learning about the many financial areas, those undergoing the CPWA certification study family dynamics.

This includes the study of anthropology and building relationships based on shared experience.

This is particularly important if the wealth involves a few generations of a family.

The difference between wealth managers and financial advisors is that wealth managers are a niche group of people.

They have cultivated specific tools and skills over the years and have a relatively small number of clients.

They can also apply distinctive designs and have a better skill set compared to other more common models.

Wealth as a tool

A common mistake that people make is to see income as a figure to make purchases with.

Having wealth does not necessarily translate into profitability.

Rather than just perceiving wealth as a product of a toiland-reap process, money can be considered a tool with which you can gain profit.

In this circumstance, having professional help will evolve this tool into a working design that will snowball into a self-sustaining model. The process often involves a lifestyle change for clients as well.

Even those who do not fall within the high-net-worth bracket should consider getting consultancy aid since the nature of wealth management allows it to be adaptable as a tool to manage one’s situation even when in deficit.

Behavioural issues

Humans are generally protective of their finances, therefore a new concept such as wealth management may not be easily accepted as it is still largely unexplored and remains unknown to many people.

As a result, finances are normally made stagnant or spent, not giving much return to its owners if not put in a bank or invested with little or no returns.

K. Gunesegaran, financial planner and money coach from Wealth Street Sdn Bhd, was recently a guest on BFM (a Malaysian radio station) and spoke about how to keep emotions in check when dealing with money.

He suggested that adhering to a certain behavioural portfolio regardless of the market’s response and adopting a shared behavioural framework that clients and investors can agree on and adopt in any finance management context offer a good solution to the behavioural issue surrounding wealth management.

Towards a bright future

As Malaysia readies itself for the increase urbanisation of its cultures and communities, the growth of wealth will mean more opportunities for the wealth management field to develop.

By substantiating certification and licensing as well as educating the changing demographics about wealth management, the field will gain more recognition within the finance industry.

Creating a niche market of professionals is also a better option than generalising the industry’s talent.<

For example, a wealth manager who specialises in real estate or the ICT industry would prove to be better than a general wealth manager in certain contexts.

Scouting for a niche specialist wealth manager, especially if the wealth involved is derived from or being invested into a certain industry, would then be a better approach to handling wealth.

However, as a client, the first step is to better understand how you would like to use and invest your money before seeking professional help.

The role of a wealth management consultant

Deciding to involve a wealth manager in planning your finances is an important step. It requires you to entrust the management of your wealth to someone else. However, leaving your wealth to stagnate or deplete would be less desirable but this is most likely the case for most people.

Most banks offer wealth management services catered to highnet-worth individuals. There are also private, stand-alone wealth management firms that not only act as advisors but as executors of clients’ instructions pertaining to their finances.

The biggest challenge for a wealth manager is to understand the financial needs of the clients.

It is important for clients to understand the role of wealth advisors to ensure their credibility and market value.

Experts need to convince middle-income and low-income earners of their skills, as these earners have the potential to become higherincome earners.

This creates business opportunities and expands networks, which is the perception of wealth management that the industry is aiming for.

This is important because their relationship with clients is not usually a short-term one and the advice and information given need to be accepted by clients with trust and understanding.

There is no one way to manage wealth because people’s lifestyles differ and different people require different aspects of their wealth to be managed, including tax management, risk assessments, retirement planning, portfolio management, estate planning, generational legacy, trust fund managements and specialised services for executives and small business owners.

Sources: Money & You, StarSpecial


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Virgin killer was adored

'Unloved' killer was adored

For someone who felt unloved and wanted revenge for that, Elliot Rodger was a much-loved child.

His Malaysian-born mother Ong Li Chin thought the world of her children, her good friend from Penang, Helen Yap said.

Yap, a well-known music producer and composer, knew Ong from their days together in Pulau Tikus on the island.

“Li Chin would always sign off her name as well as her children’s names in Christmas cards,” she said.

Foreign wire reports stated that Ong hurried to try to stop her son from carrying out his death wish. She searched frantically for her son after he posted a 140-page document “My Twisted World – The Story of Elliot Rodger” on Friday.

In it, he had lamented about how women did not like him and wanted to take revenge on them. The 22-year-old also expressed frustration at still being a virgin.

Elliot Rodger in a picture taken from his Facebook page.

He later went out and stabbed three people to death before gunning down three others.

“We were all devastated upon learning about the tragedy. It came as a shock,” Yap added.

Yap also said Rodger would have been a hit with the girls had he grown up in Malaysia.

Although Ong and other schoolmates grew apart over the years, Yap said they had always felt a special attachment towards each other.

She added that they only found out through the media that Elliot had been seeing a therapist from the age of eight.

Another of Ong’s schoolmates, who did not want to be named, said that like most children, Rodger wanted to do things his way.

Ong Li Chin with Elliot’s sister Georgia.

She recalled that the boy had refused to take his shoes off when he was entering a house in Penang.

Rodger, who was born in England and grew up in United States, was not accustomed to the Malaysian culture of being barefoot in the house.

“That is all I remember about him when his mother brought him to Penang for a holiday when he was about 10 or 11,” she said. (According to his own document, Rodger was 13 when he visted Penang).

Ong, now 53, had brought her son and daughter to visit Penang many years ago.

She then posted in a Penang website about her visit to Penang with her children, Elliot and Georgia.

“After being all around the world, having lived in the UK and now in Los Angeles, working alongside famous Hollywood figures – I can truly say you guys over there in Pulau Tikus still have ... my fondest memories,” she wrote.

Contributed by Sira Habibu The Star/Asia News network

Related stories:

 Elliot Rodger and mom Ong Li Chin

Elliot recounts memories of Penang in last document

Ong raced against time trying to stop son from fatal mistake

US-China cyber-battles intensify

The United States has accused some Chinese of hacking into American companies’ computers but the US itself has been engaging in massive spying of foreign companies and trade officials.

Reports of US spying have sparked anger in many countries

WE live in a world where “spying” by electronic means is now pervasive and practically no one or institution that uses telephones, smart phones, emails and the internet is protected from intelligence gathering.

This much we know, from the media revelations emerging from files leaked by Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the US National Security Agency.

They showed that the US has been tapping the telephones and emails of Americans and others around the world in a sweeping and systematic way.

It was revealed that even the top political leaders of Germany, Indonesia and Brazil had their mobile phones tapped, leading their countries to protest against such a bold intrusion of privacy and national security.

Last week, the intelligence issue was highlighted again when the US Justice Department indicted five individuals who are members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

They were accused of hacking into the computers of American companies in the nuclear power, steel, aluminium and solar power industries to obtain trade secrets for the benefit of Chinese state owned enterprises.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman denounced the allegations as baseless and said China “never engages in the activity of stealing commercial secrets through the internet”, and accused the US of hypocrisy.

It is common knowledge that intelligence agencies use all kinds of devices to gather information and spy on foreigners as well as their own citizens.

The US has the most sophisticated system with the broadest coverage, as the Snowden files revealed.

By charging China of spying on specific American companies for the commercial benefit of Chinese enterprises, the US was trying to draw a very fine line.

It would have been clearly double standards to accuse other countries of spying on government personalities or agencies or on civilians, as the US itself has been shown to be more systematically doing this than any other country.

In announcing the indictment on the five Chinese, the US Attorney General said the hacking was conducted to advantage Chinese enterprises, a tactic that the US denounces.

“We do not collect intelligence to provide a competitive advantage to US companies, or US commercial sectors.”

But in fact the US does spy on companies and trade policy makers and negotiators of other countries, presumably in order to obtain a commercial advantage.

Two articles by David Sanger in the New York Times last week commented on the “fine line” the US attempts to draw between spying for the benefit of specific companies, and for overall commercial advantage.

He gave examples of revelations of US agencies targeting foreign companies.

These include Huawei, a major Chinese internet and communications company.

According to his article, the Snowden documents showed that one purpose of this spying was to “get inside Huawei’s systems and use them to spy on countries that buy the company’s equipment.

“Huawei officials said they failed to understand how that differed meaningfully from what the United States has accused the Chinese of doing.

The US agency also hacked into the computers of Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company, which has data on Brazil’s offshore oil reserves and perhaps its plans for allocating licences for exploration to foreign companies. State owned oil companies in Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Africa are also intelligence targets.

The NSA also went into the computers of China Telecom, one of the largest providers of mobile phone and Internet services in Chinese cities, and Pacnet, the Hong Kong-based operator of undersea fibre optic cables.

“Once inside those companies’ proprietary technology, the NSA would have access to millions of daily conversations and emails that never touch American shores,” said Sanger.

The NSA spied on Joaquín Almunia, the antitrust commissioner of the European Commission, who had brought charges against several US companies.

In each of these cases, American officials insist the US was never acting on behalf of specific American companies, but the government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage as part of national security, said the Sanger article.

This includes spying on European or Asian trade negotiators, using the results to help American trade officials and thus the American industries and workers they are trying to bolster.

According to Sanger, the United States spies regularly for economic advantage when the goal is to support trade talks. When the US was negotiating in the 1990s to reach an accord with Japan, it bugged the Japanese negotiator’s limousine and the main beneficiaries would have been US auto companies and parts suppliers.

The US is also “widely believed to be using intelligence in support of trade negotiations underway with European and Asian trading partners. But in the view of a succession of Democratic and Republican administrations, that is fair game.”

An earlier New York Times article, citing Snowden documents, also revealed that the US and Australian agencies gathered intelligence on Indonesia and a law firm acting for it during US-Indonesia trade negotiations.

This line the US is attempting to draw between what is illegitimate (spying to benefit particular companies) and legitimate (spying to broadly benefit companies and the economy) is not appreciated nor accepted by other countries.

The views expressed are entirely the writer's own.

Contributed by Global Trends Martin Khor
Martin Khor is the Executive Director of the South Centre since 1 March 2009. He replaced Dr. Yash Tandon who was the Executive Director of the South Centre from 2005-2009
 
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