By Christopher Tan

When I read the reviews of the documentary movie Food, Inc, I felt I had to watch it since it promised that 'you would never see food the same way again'.

True to its word, the film lifts the veil on the food industry, exposing shocking truths about what we eat and how it is produced and at what cost to our health.

In the bid to produce food faster and at a higher profit margin for a world that is growing to be one of fast-food nations, chickens are grown in small coops with little light and no space for movements.

They grow faster and fatter, but with bad organs and bodies that make them too weak to even walk. Cows are fed with corn instead of grass, and because they are not created to eat corn, they develop harmful E. coli bacteria that we subsequently eat in beef.

The documentary brought home the point that when you seek fast growth often at the expense of quality, something has to give - in this case, health.

I left the movie becoming more conscious of the food that we eat. But more than that, I saw that the financial planning and wealth management sector is not unlike the food industry being depicted in the film.

You see, true and good quality financial planning entails a long and tedious process of understanding a client's need for certain investment returns, his ability to bear the risk because of the returns he needs, and finally how willing he is to bear the risks. This must be done before any recommendations are given.

To understand a client's need for returns and his capacity for risks, we will require hours of probing to understand his current assets and liabilities situation and his financial objectives. The process requires financial advisers to spend time knowing his insurance portfolio, his health, his family commitment and many more factors.

It is a process that requires at least 20 to 30 hours of work and quite a few meetings to complete. The current industry minimum requirement of a simple risk profile questionnaire measures only the third part of the process - a person's willingness to bear risks, which is insufficient for good advice.

I have no doubt that there are relationship managers who genuinely want to do a good job, but sadly, it will be tough for them to do so on the current platforms of most financial institutions. Most financial institutions are not made for financial planning, just like cows are not made to eat corn.

Customers very seldom walk into a financial institution prepared to stay for hours for financial advice. They are there just to do a transaction.

It is near impossible for relationship managers to spend hours finding out from customers their most private information, without the latter taking along their financial documents, and especially if they are meeting them for the first time.

Relationship managers do not want to lose the sales opportunity once a customer leaves the bank, so they are pressured into selling the product fast, by simply filling in the risk profile questionnaire. It meets regulatory requirements but fails to achieve advisory quality standards.

Besides process, the quality of advisers is paramount. To give reasonably sound financial advice, one should have at least a tertiary education, a professional certification like a Certified Financial Planner and a minimum of two to three years of experience. If we expect our doctors, lawyers and accountants to be properly qualified, why should we expect something lower from someone who will be managing our life savings and hard-earned income?

Over the past five years, in their pursuit of fast revenue growth, financial institutions and many financial advisory firms have recruited relationship managers and advisers en masse. Many of them were fresh out from school and drawn by the lucrative compensation of this industry.

There is really something wrong with this industry. We measure success of advisers and relationship managers by their sales and whether they achieve the 'Million Dollar Round Table' status (measured by new business brought in), which has nothing to do with quality of advice.

Just like food corporations that seek fast growth, we end up having processes and people in our wealth management industry that will ultimately cause the E. coli bacteria that affect our wealth, and sometimes financial death.

And just as Food, Inc ended with advice on how consumers should fight against the unethical food companies, I urge you to do the same towards financial institutions. You have the power to improve the quality of advice that you rightfully deserve.

The writer is the chief executive of wealth management firm Providend.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.