Objective: Increase consideration of BNY by helping financial advisors engage in important retirement conversations with their clients. With BNY Mellon as their partner, the Brave Conversations on Personal Retirement Program would provide the tools needed to educate clients, while strengthening the relationship between advisors and BNY Mellon.

Strategy: Created a one-of-a-kind, themed, deep, content-rich communications platform to help advisors engage individual clients and prospects in the “brave conversations” required to ensure effective retirement planning. Brave Conversations is a comprehensive program and set of resources that lead advisors and clients through the difficult thinking and choices necessary on four fundamentally identified financial behaviors according to BNY Mellon – earning, spending, investing and insuring – that are at the heart of personal retirement success.

Execution: Using these four behaviors as the BNY Mellon Framework, partnered with the Adler Branding and Marketing agency to develop;

• White paper on each,

• Theme book with 20 key concepts each analyzed for the relationship to these behaviors,

• Retirement planning checklists and more to ensure the content, learnings and ultimately the investment behavior required for retirement success can be addressed in the most personalized and appropriate way for each individual investor through their advisor.

• A Brave Conversations Advisors Guide, which details the entire communications platform, and shows how to implement and customize the program.

• And an always-on digital marketing campaign.

Results: In the initial six months the program generated more than 2,000 leads and more than 4,000 advisor web views. We sent approximately 460,000 emails and achieved a 10.08% average open rate, multiple times the industry standard (when open rates were meaningful). Feedback from financial advisors was outstanding and overwhelming. Advisors told us it was improving their client communications and improving the substance and frequency of retirement conversations:

 “In all my years this has been by far the most valuable presentation we’ve had. These materials are outstanding.”

“The retirement book is excellent and my advisors want to get their hands on it.”

“I love the concepts here … holistic yet specific to retirement.”

“These materials do a really good job of helping us make the difficult simple.”