What truly makes an advisor exceptional? Libet Anderson, Community Leader at Cetera, joins host Sean Walters to discuss what excellence really looks like amidst rising artificial intelligence adoption and fiduciary expectations. Libet walks us through her career in the industry, the evolving standards of excellence, and what separates the best from the rest, along with how leaders can raise the bar across entire teams.
Sean Walters: Hello, this is Sean Walters. Welcome to The Exceptional Advisor. I’m the CEO of the Investments & Wealth Institute. This podcast is built for experienced advisors and firm leaders who are navigating complexity — markets that shift, expectations that continue to rise, and a profession that is evolving in real time. Each month we step back from the noise and focus on the bigger picture: what it really means to be an exceptional advisor today, and what it will require tomorrow. I’m not an advisor myself, but I have served professional associations of financial advisors for about 30 years. Today’s conversation is with the chair of one of the premier professional associations — if I would say, the premier professional association for financial advisors — the Investments & Wealth Institute. My guest today is Elizabeth, or Libet, Anderson. Welcome.
Libet Anderson: Thank you, Sean. I did not even know you knew it was Elizabeth, because not many people know that.
Sean Walters: Well, we should probably call this the Elizabeth podcast, because our first three guests are all named Elizabeth. It’s almost like we’re doing a Catholic podcast or something. So thank you for being here. Anderson is the community engagement leader for Cetera Wealth Partners. She brings more than 33 years of experience in financial services, and she served on our board for a lot of years. I was really looking forward to this conversation. Libet has served as an advisor. She’s worked in regional broker-dealers. She’s served as an advisor for a wirehouse and independent broker-dealers. She’s really looked at this profession from all angles. Libet, welcome — I’m really glad you’re here.
Libet Anderson: Thanks — I was a wholesaler too, can’t forget that gig. And now I’m 20 years into home-office roles, so quite the run.
Sean Walters: So that is how I like to start this podcast. We’re a professional association, a community of advisors for advisors. And like every community, people sometimes need people to get going in their career. So talk about who helped you start your career in financial services, and what did they say or do that nudged you along this path in the right direction?
Libet Anderson: Well, the first was actually someone who handed me a book. So it wasn’t as much the person — it was a book. It’s an old, old book called The Banker’s Secret. I grew up with zero, and I mean zero, financial knowledge. Mom and Dad never talked about money or saving, anything, zero. Someone handed me that book, and it was real simple, but I just thought, wow, there’s information out there. There are things I need to know. I started to become enamored initially with finance in general, and then it was the markets, and my interest just — I couldn’t get enough. My sister actually — I have two sisters and three brothers — but my middle sister had already, after her MBA, started in the institutional fixed-income sales arena, and she encouraged me. She said, this is a wonderful business, there’s lots of things you can do here. She loved what she was doing and thought it had a lot to offer. I took her up on part of it, which meant the industry in general, but I went over to the dark side of retail. So I went straight toward learning the retail business and helping individuals achieve their particular goals. She pushed me, I’m glad she did, and here I am.
Sean Walters: Was there a pivot point, a turning point in your career where you went in a different direction and it shaped the leader you became?
Libet Anderson: Absolutely. I think sometimes the industry changed and I had to move. Other times my life changed and I had to make a different decision. I became a single parent — my kids were four, five, and seven. I was at Merrill Lynch, trying to navigate that world that was very structured and very difficult to have any kind of accommodation for the first day of kindergarten, for example. I found that very hard, and that’s sometimes where I made changes and moved into different roles. The other thing I’ve always done that I think helped me eventually lead a firm: I’ve always been a hand raiser. I was at a meeting last week with a lot of senior leaders at Cetera, where I now am. Mike Durbin, the CEO — his initial conversation was about raising your hand, and how many things you learn by offering to take on something you know nothing about. I sat in the middle of client services and watched them do what they do, which is incredibly difficult. I have always been a hand raiser. That’s partly how I got to IWI. I was at a conference — the annual conference, I thought, was amazing. The speakers were people I’d read about, books I’d read, and there they were. I raised my hand and said, I’d love to help on this conference committee. I wanted to get behind the curtain — I always want to know how things work. So I got behind the curtain and haven’t come back around, because I continued on that conference committee and a lot of other committees, and have really enjoyed all that I’ve gotten and learned from being involved with the Investments & Wealth Institute.
What Makes an Exceptional Financial Advisor?
Sean Walters: We’re going to come back to that, because it’s a great lead into the first segment on what makes an exceptional advisor — your point about how you raised your hand and were willing to do a little bit more than perhaps a lot of your peers. As a woman in financial advice, you’re not alone in that. I remember one time when I was looking at the Barron’s top-advisor list, and how many of our certificants were on that list — women on the list. We had twice as many women on the list as men. Men tended to just use their charisma and their technique to grow a big book. Women tended to lean into learning more, gaining their knowledge, growing their credentials. I thought that was an interesting note. Barron’s, and a lot of the lists we all use to try to find a professional, are great, but they don’t really define what makes an exceptional advisor. Having worked with so many advisors over the years, what are the things that make an exceptional advisor?
Libet Anderson: It’s interesting when you say “an exceptional advisor.” We all realize there isn’t just one way to do this, and there isn’t one perfect model. I almost thought about building that avatar — having this person’s brain that was so good for this business, and someone else’s organizational skills, and you could put together that ideal. The reality is, what I found when I thought about all the people I’ve been fortunate to be around in this industry — I did figure out the common thread, and it’s a mindset of service. The exceptional advisor is focused on service: service to their clients, service to their team, their firm — whatever it might be, whichever business model they’ve chosen. And many people move through various business models in this industry that can last a lifetime. But the idea of service is that they’re bringing their best self, everything they can, to the table every day. Depending on the clients, the age of the clients, the scenario of the client, it’s different. Some days it’s bringing that most basic thing they need to help them just understand the language of investments and finance. At another time, it’s about having that advanced credential, because you’re dealing with someone and that’s a service. You’ve gone out and taken time to add to your skill set, to the things you know, and then you’re bringing it to the table for them — whether it’s deep planning expertise, portfolio construction, high-net-worth issues for tax consequences, retirement income planning. All of that is a service you’re bringing to those clients, to your teammates, and to all of the people you serve. So I thought about all of that, and service stood out to me as the one thing that seems to be consistent among all the people I’d put in that group of exceptional.
How Should Financial Advisors Respond as AI Raises the Bar?
Sean Walters: One of our upcoming guests is Michael Kitces. He’s talked about how the only form of capital investment you make when you’re wanting to grow your services as a business is between your ears — you invest in your knowledge. So how should leaders think about education and credentialing — not as a box to check or a way to signal to your clients, but as a true performance system, a performance-management lever?
Libet Anderson: Well, speaking of clients — we wish they knew, right? You wish clients understood what various credentials mean, what licenses mean. But I don’t think that will ever happen. At the same time, leadership does know. The best firms you see out there have requirements for certain ways of doing business, for certain levels of clients you might be working with, so they know you’re bringing that skill set. I even wish advisors understood the difference between the various credentials. Sometimes there is a check-the-box: I need this thing to say I’ve gone beyond my basic education and my licenses. But there seems to be a lot of mass herding sometimes for one designation or another. I think leadership can do a lot to learn about the designations that are out there, what skill set they bring, and how to encourage the advisors working in that particular market to go and do that extra work it takes. It’s better for all of us. It’s definitely better for the clients. It’s better for the advisors — they’re bringing more to the table. And it’s better for the firm, from a compliance perspective and all the things we know we need to do to serve those clients in the best way.
Sean Walters: And the bar just keeps rising. I was around in the late ’90s when there were sessions at financial-planning conferences about how the internet is now available to let your clients find out more information, so you need to be a little sharper in your game. You can’t assume a client walking in the door doesn’t know anything about taxes or investments or retirement. Now, fast-forward another 30 years, we’re in AI, and people are sitting in the lobby of the advisor’s office getting the advice they’re about to get — and fact-checking it, or comparing their financial advisor to whatever AI is feeding them. Not to mention fiduciary regulations are higher. So the bar just keeps clicking higher. How should the profession respond? What would you advise advisors to do, knowing that client expectations are just going to continue to rise?
Libet Anderson: Right. Think about the earliest days, where it was, “Trust me, because I’m using words and terminology you can’t possibly understand.” And that worked for a long time. Clients handed over piles of money to someone who spoke a language they didn’t understand, and they didn’t try to explain — that wasn’t part of how it worked. They weren’t necessarily doing bad things; they just didn’t have to. It was, “I know this stuff, and I’ll take care of you.” Most did, so that’s the good thing. But today, as you say, there’s almost too much access to information. Whether you’re using ChatGPT or just good old Google, you have access to a lot of information — and not all of it actually agrees. So now, I think we all know nothing is going to replace the empathy and the compassion of a person. But if they can use the tools to complement what they know — I would love a requirement that advisors are always lifelong learners, that they’re constantly striving to enhance their skills. Because what we knew last year still isn’t all current; things change, rules change, regulations change, products change. So it is not set-it-and-forget-it or one-and-done. We hope firms learn to use whatever artificial intelligence you want to use to complement that advisor’s skill set. Go out there and use it to do the basic stuff — the note-taking, so you have your checklist after a meeting done for you by the time you finish. That’s wonderful. But the knowledge you have, the empathy you have, the ability to understand — when you are deeply credentialed… One of the things I learned — I remember my CIMA was, you know, 100 years ago, but not exactly — I just remember I would come home and test my ability to explain something like standard deviation on my kids. I’m sure they loved it. There I am at the track meet saying, “Okay, does this make sense to you?” I taught them some basic things, like the Rule of 72. But when I got to the deeper concepts, it was about this: if I knew it really well, I could explain it to a child and they would understand it. So, being in that lifelong-learner category, I think firms should continue to make sure we have ongoing, continuous improvement in our knowledge of the industry.
Sean Walters: We both lead an association that is a credentialing body, and credentialing bodies right now are under a lot of pressure, because AI can pass our tests. It can pass the most difficult tests among us today —
Libet Anderson: And they can go to law school or med school. Right.
Sean Walters: No matter what vertical you’re talking about. So it starts to question the validity of the certification exam and the certification process — which is more than the exam, by the way. It’s experience for a reason. It’s ethics for a reason. And it’s education for a reason. We don’t just want you to recite facts in an exam and pass it; we want you to learn and apply knowledge. So more and more, as credentialing bodies, we’re certifying trust, judgment, ethical credibility, and empathy. We may not be able to ask a test question about that, but you’re likely not going to be successful if you can’t relate with your clients.
Libet Anderson: Right. And passing a test means what? The day I passed my Series 7, I couldn’t do anything. I still didn’t know what to do.
Why Build an Advisory Team With Complementary Credentials?
Sean Walters: This gets into the next segment I wanted to ask about. We know a lot of really successful sole proprietors — I know you’ve got a lot of them that you support in your day job too — so we want to be careful how we address this. But certainly the notion of teaming has become more relevant in today’s client-advisor relationship, for some of the reasons we talked about, even with AI: you have different takes and different professionals as part of a team that can handle a client better. What are some of the trends you’re seeing in teaming, and why is there such a shift toward this new horizontal team model? Why is that important for advisors to be thinking about?
Libet Anderson: Yes. You mentioned I am very ensconced in the independent channel — I started out over on the private-client side, and I’ve been in the independent channel for a number of years now. I love it because of the entrepreneurial spirit I get to work around every day. A lot of them are building teams, and a lot of them are putting together that horizontal model. What I think is best is a team of complementary skills. Even if you thought about designations, they are skills that complement each other and work together. The CIMA is very different from the CPWA. I just took my RMA — as you can probably tell by my face, I’m getting up in age; I turned 63 this year. I did the RMA to understand retirement income planning for myself, if nothing else. It was a wonderful exercise to go through and learn things I did not know. On the ideal team, the exceptional team, we would put together people who have various designations that complement each other, so they could take care of a client from beginning to end. It’s funny — there’s a phrase they use here at Cetera called “forever home.” They don’t espouse just one perfect model, but they do work toward taking care of advisors from beginning to end throughout their career and their life cycle in this industry. I think IWI does that as well, so it’s kind of nice to talk about those at the same time.
How Is Retirement Income Planning Different From Accumulation?
Sean Walters: I’ve got a follow-up on your Retirement Management Advisor experience, because I don’t often get to talk to a recent new certificant — you just went through the program. What are one or two things you learned that really do help an advisor, or a team of advisors, deliver better advice to the end client?
Libet Anderson: Oh my gosh. I didn’t really think about it. What we love doing is building portfolios. We love the markets, if we’re in this industry. Accumulation is fun — it’s like watching this thing build, taking that snowball from zero up to something, and you get to talk about how big their nest egg is going to be. What I probably thought, like many people, is that you get toward retirement and it’s just going to be an easy thing where you add a little bonds in here every once in a while. It’s just easy. It’s not. You put it in reverse, right? It is so much different when you talk about true retirement income planning: “I’ve got to replace this paycheck, and I’ve got to figure out what the value is today of those future resources I might have access to, and then determine how much is left. What do I need to do, what are my goals, and how can I get there?” It was a wonderful process once I dug into that exercise — literally going down the rabbit hole of finding those dollars, and learning that retirement income planning is very different from wealth accumulation. The decumulation cycle is just full of interest for me now. I’m not there yet — still got quite a few years left of doing this job I love — but it’s definitely opened my eyes, and I enjoyed the process of learning what it means to get to that stage, and how different it’s going to feel from what I’ve been doing.
Sean Walters: That’s great. A personal example from my own financial advisor: I recently had a meeting with them, and they brought in one of the team members who was a CFP — knew her stuff for sure — but she was brought in to really talk with me about retirement. I have not been through the RMA, but I know what’s in it, and oh my gosh, there were so many opportunities I feel my advisor and this person on the team missed by not having all of those tools they could have just pulled out and put on the table: a household balance sheet, a retirement policy statement. So much stuff, so much value. I’m not a high-net-worth client either, but if I was, it would have been even more impactful for that firm if they had pulled out that toolbox.
Libet Anderson: Right. I’m not either. My kids are early 30s and early in their careers, and they’ve all got a good track going, but I can’t wait to sit them down — at least first show them mine. Then, think of what they can do if, by age 40, you put together that household balance sheet and had a real plan. Imagine the difference. I can’t even fathom.
How Can the Financial Advice Profession Become More Unified?
Sean Walters: This leads into our final segment. You’re incoming chair — well, you’ve already started; you’re two months into your two-year term as chair of the Investments & Wealth Institute Board of Directors. What are some of the things you’re excited about that are related to the strategic plan? What do you feel are your personal leadership priorities leading that organization over the next couple of years?
Libet Anderson: I think the biggest thing I’d love to help accomplish — it’s a team, there are a lot of people — is the awareness of the Institute. We have such good loyalty among our members. You talked about community at the very beginning of our conversation, Sean, and community is a big thing to IWI. When you come to the conferences, you’ll find your community — whether it’s people focused on women clients, underserved communities, NexGen. We’ve tried to make it so that — like we say here at Cetera — we make the big feel small. We’re supporting you: you go to a big conference, but then you’ll find your community within that conference. The people who know about IWI love IWI. It’s the rest that I need to get to. We’re 40 years in and still scratching the surface, I think, of both national and international awareness that we are here — that if you have this particular type of client you want to serve, go back to the service model and get one of these credentials so you can do a better job and have a broader, deeper skill set to help them reach their goals, whatever they might be.
Sean Walters: Even broader than IWI — think about not just our organization, which is a non-profit — what does the profession, the advice profession, most need right now? What are some of the things you wish the profession might get over the next couple, three years?
Libet Anderson: The first thing that came to mind is a steady hand. I think we can get whipsawed right now between things you read — AI is replacing this or that. Remember that a lot of things have been close to replacing this community, but it doesn’t work. We are losing advisors net-net, I believe, every year still, so we do need to find a way — go to the NexGen, go to underserved communities, and find people. It’s a wonderful profession. It has served me well through all my ups and downs over the last 34 years, and I’ve been able to find a different way to do this business — moving from producer into wholesaling, to home office, and all of them served me very well. So what the profession needs is that steady hand of these long-serving institutions that can guide us through, and not the shiny object of crypto or AI or something else. They are wonderful, and they’re going to be additive to all of us, but they don’t replace us, and they don’t replace the empathy — back to the compassion, back to the knowledge and skill set that advisors need to have. So I think it is important in the world today that we have these stable institutions that continue to guide the future of this industry. Because whatever else you do in life — my daughter’s a dentist, my boys are engineers — they all need this information. And it’s kind of nice for Mom, because I get to be useful still.
Sean Walters: I’ve got one follow-up question — a tough one, so I’ll put you on your feet for it, and I have a thought on it as well. For so many years — let’s say the 40 years IWI has been an organization, and I have familiarity with another organization that’s been around 50 years, also serving financial advisors and financial planners — there’s been a lot of us-versus-them, kind of infighting. You’ve got reg reps versus IA reps. You’ve got firms versus advisors. There’s this type of business model versus that type. You’ve worked in a lot of those different places — you know exactly what I’m talking about. You might work at one type of business model one week and a different type the next. So you’ve seen the same thing I have: we have more in common than we have different. How can we get together and be more of a unified profession? What do you think it’s going to take for us to shed some of those old battles and come together as a more unified financial-advice profession?
Libet Anderson: It certainly is a shame that we waste one ounce of energy on us-versus-them, because, again, there is no perfect model — either of an advisor or of a firm. There are lots of different ways to do this business. As I said, the entrepreneur, 1099 model that I work a lot in today isn’t for everybody. Not everybody is meant to own their own business, and many people do very well in the private-client model. It’s a different model. But I think following the herd is a problem — that’s what everybody does: they get this designation, or they do this thing, or they work at this firm. Can we think of the greater good, and can we think of the clients that really do need us, that really don’t have access to this kind of information? We are constantly raising the bar — can it go too high? I had a fire inspector here today in the office, and when he figured out what we did, he started asking me — he’s like, “Well, I think I need help.” I said, give me your name, I’ve got some advisors I can connect you with. But people need it. They need this information. I would love for us to step back and draw some alliances, because we need everybody: W-2, 1099, hybrid, RIA, registered rep — we need it all. They all serve their place. They all serve a function. I want them all to be credentialed. I want them all to be lifelong learners, because I think that’s the more important piece that’s often missing.
Sean Walters: Totally. Well said. I think that’s exactly it. The Investments & Wealth Institute has come a long way since I started, even in 2007. I think it was 13% independent advisors in that membership of 6,000 people. Today, we serve 30,000 advisors from all business models — 15,500 certified members from all business models. We represent the advice patchwork quilt. I’m a sci-fi nerd, Libet — I think it’s going to be humans versus robots. I think that’s our unifying force. Human advice has got to survive over the cyborgs giving our clients advice.
Libet Anderson: Well, I — yeah, we just want the cyborgs to clean my house and do those things for me, and I’ll be just fine. I can go there and help more people, because I don’t have to clean the bathroom.
Sean Walters: That’s right. So, a last question — I usually ask all the guests, all the Elizabeths anyway this year: if you could give one piece of advice to advisors, regardless of where they are in their career, what would it be?
Libet Anderson: I guess I would say: become a lifelong learner, if you’re not already. If you’ve sort of settled into your business model, you’ve got your licenses, and you do your thing, it’s really easy to look down and just be busy. But taking some time to advance your skills — it’s such a good thing for your brain to be used in that way, and to expand. We know you build more pathways in that brain; the brain actually grows, which is crazy. So get out there and learn some new things. I’d say get some credentials that advance you, maybe into a new market. Find some teammates who want to work on that together — it’s more fun in a group. So keep on keeping on.
Sean Walters: I think, Libet, this has been a really good conversation. Leadership models itself in a lot of ways, and you’ve been, and continue to be, a strong leader for this profession, just in the way you approach things. You just earned a certification later in your career than most people — so you’re still committed to lifelong learning. You’re not just talking the talk; you’re walking it. I think that’s a really good beacon that you serve for our membership — continuing to be a lifelong learner yourself, and also volunteering so much of your time to help guide the organization in the right direction. So thank you for that.
Libet Anderson: I’m looking forward to it — a good two years of buckling down and trying to accomplish some of these big goals.
Sean Walters: We’ll hopefully keep it easy for you. So thank you all for listening to The Exceptional Advisor from the Investments & Wealth Institute. If this conversation resonated with you, share it with a colleague or team member who is committed to elevating their own practice. We’ll be back again next month with another perspective on the forces shaping the future of advice. Until then, keep raising the standard. Thank you all. Take care.
Libet Anderson: Thank you.
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