Beyond Technology: Better Client Communication at Scale
by Charley Kersten, Head of Marketing
The work advisors do for clients has become more sophisticated. Portfolios are more personalized. Taxes are increasingly part of the investment conversation. Clients arrive with concentrated positions, legacy holdings, inherited assets, or portfolios that were built under different market conditions and no longer fit neatly into their current plan.
Those situations create opportunities for deeper advisor engagement. They also create communication challenges.
Explaining tax-smart transitions, ongoing tax-loss harvesting, embedded capital gains, model-based investing, and coordinated portfolio management requires clear language. It requires repetition. And it often requires materials that clients can take with them, revisit later, and share with spouses, family members, accountants, or other trusted professionals.
Without the right content, advisors may find themselves repeatedly recreating the same explanations from scratch. That can be inefficient for the advisor and inconsistent for the client.
55ip’s investor-facing collateral is designed to help solve that problem.
Investor-Facing Collateral That Extends the Advisor’s Brand
55ip has developed a series of educational pieces that help bring tax-smart investing concepts to life for end clients. These materials are written to be accessible, practical, and focused on real-world investor situations. Just as importantly, they can be customized with an advisor’s firm name and logo.
That customization matters.
When an advisor shares a co-branded piece with a client, the content does more than explain 55ip’s capabilities. It reinforces the advisor’s own value proposition. It gives the advisor a professional, polished way to demonstrate that they are thinking proactively about taxes, transitions, portfolio fit, and long-term client outcomes.
For smaller RIAs, this can be especially powerful. Many firms want to deliver the same level of client education and marketing sophistication as larger enterprise competitors, but without the cost and complexity of building every asset internally. 55ip’s collateral library helps narrow that gap.
The result is a practical marketing extension: content that helps advisors educate, differentiate, and deepen client relationships while staying focused on the work only they can do.
A Growing Library of Investor Insights
The Investor Insights series is built around topics that advisors regularly need to explain to clients. Existing pieces include:
- Money in Motion, which helps explain how tax-smart portfolio transitions can support major investment changes, such as moving assets, changing strategies, or adjusting risk.
- Silver Lining of Investment Losses, which helps clients understand how market losses may create potential tax-loss harvesting opportunities.
- Tax-Smart Investing, which provides a broader overview of how taxes can affect investment returns and how a holistic, technology-driven approach may help manage tax considerations over time.
Together, these pieces give advisors a practical toolkit for client education. They help translate sophisticated planning and investment concepts into language that is easier for investors to understand.
Now, 55ip is adding a new piece to that series: Island of Misfit Toys.
Introducing Island of Misfit Toys
Many investors accumulate holdings over time that once made sense but no longer fit cleanly into their current portfolio. An inherited stock portfolio. A fund purchased decades ago. A concentrated company stock position. Transferred assets from a prior advisor. Overlapping exposures that create unintended risk.
None of these investments are necessarily “bad.” In fact, many may represent past success. But as goals, tax situations, market conditions, and portfolio strategies evolve, some holdings can begin to feel disconnected from the investor’s broader plan.
That is the idea behind Island of Misfit Toys.
The new Investor Insights piece uses a memorable metaphor to help clients recognize portfolios that have become patchworks of legacy investments. More importantly, it introduces a constructive path forward: a tax-smart transition proposal.
The piece helps advisors explain how they can evaluate current positions, assess tax implications, define a target portfolio, establish a tax-aware transition path, and use ongoing management to help move the client toward a more coordinated investment strategy over time.
For advisors, the piece creates a natural conversation opener around a common client challenge: embedded capital gains and the hesitation that often comes with changing investment direction. For clients, it makes the issue easier to understand by framing the problem in human, relatable terms.
Helping Advisors Do More With Every Client Conversation
55ip’s core value is rooted in tax-smart technology, automation, and portfolio implementation. But the advisor experience does not end with the platform.
Advisors also need help bringing the value of that technology into client conversations. They need ways to explain what is happening, why it matters, and how it connects to the client’s goals.
The Investor Insights series is one way 55ip supports that broader journey. By offering customizable, investor-facing materials, 55ip helps advisors turn sophisticated capabilities into clear client communication.
For advisory firms that may not have a full marketing team, that support can be especially meaningful. It gives them access to client-ready content that can be branded as their own, delivered in their voice, and used to reinforce the value they bring to client relationships.
Interested in learning more about how 55ip can support your client communications or in creating co-branded literature for your practice? Reach out to our team to get started.
1baaddb1-90bc-11f1-bc9c-8327f044bb43 08/26
