Performance and returns ‘aren’t everything,’ UBS advisor says

investmentnews.com:

Brenda O’Connor Juanas is different than most financial advisors in the US. As a citizen of both Canada and the US, she’s able to offer her Canadian clients the best of both worlds.

“What I often do at UBS is supplement what is being offered by the Canadian banks with what they can’t necessarily get access to,” said O’Connor Juanas, a senior vice president at UBS. “For example, alternative products. We have a really robust platform here, and Canadian resident clients may not always be able to get access to those types of investment ideas or opportunities.”

O’Connor Juanas spends a lot of her time educating and engaging with her 40 ultra-high-net worth families. Her clients are a mix of Canadian and American creators of wealth, founders, and entrepreneurs transitioning through the sale of a business or an IPO, who come to her by referral. 

Education and engagement with her clients are what she describes as her “big mantra.”

“Education creates engagement and engagement is what leads to long-term relationships with clients,” she says. “So you have to figure out how to deliver your messaging and how to deliver your knowledge in a way that makes sense for that client. There are some female clients that just absorb and need information in a different way.”

O’Connor Juanas added that advisors have to understand what the drivers of a client’s wealth are, particularly when it comes to women, and that women should be treated and served in the same vein as men.

“Their sources of wealth are differentiated and that’s the thing that should be driving how we service them – whether they’re an entrepreneur, a founder, a divorcee, someone that’s inherited wealth, someone who’s an executive,” she says. “When I work with women, I don’t just