Peter Dougherty, Financial planner, BISSAN Wealth Management

Why financial planning?

When I lived in New York, a neighbor of mine asked me: “I’ve got this IRA bond fund. I need to make a required minimum withdraw; I started collecting Social Security a year after I’d qualified so it’s 8% higher than I would’ve otherwise received. When and how much should I withdraw?”

I didn’t know. At that time, I’d spent twenty years working at investment banks advising corporate treasurers on how to issue new bonds. But that wasn’t going to help my neighbor. He had a general question, but I only knew the answers to complicated and specialized questions.

Surprisingly, that was my motivation to leave Wall Street in New York and eventually join BISSAN Wealth Management in Spain. It’s where I can truly make a difference to PEOPLE, helping folks like my neighbor to get their financial plans running smoothly.

Why Spain?

The focus within the financial advisory business in the United States is increasingly on high-net-worth investors. The smaller investors are frequently moved toward some form of digital advice, like robot-advisors, and the dwindling number of human advisors that service smaller clients have too many clients and are encouraged to cross-sell their firm’s products to increase revenue.

But I want to help all investors- not just those of high-net-worth. Nor do I want to cross-sell products that my clients may not really need.Because my morals don’t fit with the direction of the U.S. financial advisory industry, I decided to help folks with financial advice and planning in Spain.

The other reason I chose to become a financial planner within Spain is the number 98,875. That’s how many financial planners are certified in the United States. Nearly one hundred thousand. With so many choices, odds are you can find someone good.

In Spain, on the other hand, there are currently less than a thousand financial planners who are certified. So, if I weren’t in Spain to help expats here, they would have few good options.

Why are there so few financial planners in Spain compared to the U.S.?

One reason is that the United States has a thirty-eight-year head-start in the financial planning field. The European Financial Planning Association (EFPA) of Spain certified its first financial planners in 2010. In the U.S., financial planners were first certified in 1972.

The bigger reason, though, is that Spain is an exceedingly bank-centric country. To prepare for Spain’s entry into the European Union in the 1980s, several Spanish banks consolidated and merged. The purpose was to put Spanish banks on an equal footing with the larger size and sophistication of their European rivals.

Once they reached sufficient size, the big Spanish banks had an additional growth engine unavailable to their European rivals: expansion into the large banking market within Latin America. Spanish banks came to dominate many aspects of banking in Latin America in no small part because they share a common language and culture with most countries there. Which, in turn, provided both seasoning for the senior executives of these Spanish banks as well as additional capital to grow ever larger in Europe.

The financial crisis of 2008 produced another wave of bank consolidations. Currently, the three largest banks (Santander, BBVA and La Caixa) are what remains of what had been 29 separate banks or savings banks at the start of 2008.

Banks in Spain have been slow to understand how important financial planning is for many families. Thus, given the size and significance of Spain’s banks within the financial infrastructure of the country, it’s not surprising that financial planning is relegated to the shadows and that there are so few financial planners.

What credentials do you have?

In Spain, I am certified as a European Financial Planner (EFP) by the European Financial Planning Association of Spain (EFPA España) and hold a MS in taxation from Instituto Europeo de Asesoría Fiscal.

In the U.S., I am certified as a Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor® and hold an MBA in finance.