The Suit Magazine

What do you do in a world of too many choices, too much information and not enough time or personal expertise to properly evaluate those choices?  Isn’t this the problem everyone faces in trying to navigate the financial services marketplace?  With more than 22,000 mutual funds, over 5,000 private account managers and thousands of insurance products, can anyone cut through all of the marketing hype, filter out all of the behind-the-scenes deals and relationships, and make effective use of all of that information to empower the public to make better informed product and service selections?  Eric Smith and Consulting Services Support Corporation (CSSC) may well have found the answer—and they have a new process patent that testifies to the uniqueness of their solution.

Prior to founding CSSC, Smith was a practicing estate planning and business transactions attorney for 22 years. He told The Suit how his experiences as an attorney led to the development of CSSC’s unique approach.  “In routinely referring my clients to financial services providers, most of them would say, ‘I don’t want to go to someone who will just try to sell me something.  Can’t you just handle it for me?’  Unfortunately, I couldn’t.  I didn’t have the product knowledge to do so.  But that didn’t stop them from bringing the recommendations back to me and asking, ‘What do you think?’   The problem was that I had no better way to look behind the curtain than they did, to try to figure out why one product or service—rather than any of the hundreds of others—would have been recommended.  The process was simply opaque.”

Smith’s epiphany came when he realized that his clients really had only one question—one that, despite its obvious simplicity, no one ever seemed to expressly ask: Of all the available choices, which one is best for me?  “It was incredible,” Smith said, “to realize that no one dealing within the financial services marketplace could go through a selection process and, at the end, definitively state that they had gotten what was objectively the best for them.  Everyone in the marketplace seemed to have an agenda – something they wanted you to buy.”

Here was a broad need Smith was prepared to fill. “We focused on how we could empower our clients to answer this basic question. And ultimately, we found a way,” he said.  Smith believes his solution, a client-centric “buy side” approach, will fundamentally change the financial services marketplace.  He’s not alone; some prominent ERISA attorneys agree that this could become the next fiduciary standard for how money managers are selected and performance is monitored in large institutional plans.

And the innovation doesn’t stop there.  CSSC has developed a unique model for distributing this new process.  It’s enabling law firms, accounting firms, community banks and other advisory firms to set up separate consulting entities to provide this new and expanded range of services to their clients.  CSSC serves as an outsourced staff for these new consulting entities, leaving the lawyers, CPAs and community bankers free to advise clients, which Smith believes to be the best use of their time.  “We do all of the other work necessary for them to credibly render financial and other consulting services to their clients beyond what normally falls under the definition of the practice of law or accounting,” Smith said. “In other words, we help diversify and expand their sources of revenue, while they provide their clients with a true alternative to a too-often predatory and corrupt financial services marketplace.”  Interestingly, Smith pointed out that “this leveraging of their time can often produce per-hour earnings significantly in excess of what they might earn from their accounting and legal work.”

Smith believes that through the active assistance of a growing cadre of lawyers, CPAs and community bankers, CSSC's methodology will effectively transfer the balance of power away from the vendors and distributors of financial products and services, and into the hands of the investing public.  This transfer is CSSC’s stated goal.  “What makes us truly different from traditional financial services providers is that our unique ‘buy side’ methodology does not in any way compromise the traditional roles of attorneys and CPAs as the providers of independent, objective advice,” Smith said.  “We don’t care which product a client selects, as long as the client has determined that it is best for them.  Moreover, we are so confident in our belief in this new process’s potential to improve investment results that, to our knowledge, we are the only consulting firm in the country willing to offer institutional clients pure performance pricing.  In other words, if the results produced by the use of our patented process do not exceed the institution’s benchmark indexes—what they could have earned by passively investing in index funds—we don't get paid.”

Most great business ideas are really quite simple, and Smith has a very simple and compelling argument.  “If you could go to somebody you already know and trust—your CPA, estate planning attorney or your community banker—and if through that person you could gain access to virtually all investment and insurance choices, but could have those choices scored and ranked specifically to your individual or business needs, and you could see the objectivity of the study fully transparent on its face, enabling you to make a better decision for yourself, your family or your business, why would you ever deal with a product salesperson again?”

He believes the answer is obvious: you wouldn’t.  And he may well be right about that. If so, his business model might prove to be just as transformational within the $24 trillion financial services marketplace as Apple’s has been in consumer electronics.

For more information please visit: www.cssc.com

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