Planning Excellence Lead Consultant

Northwestern Mutual • New York, NY

1d • Onsite

About The Position

This role designs and creates standards, best practices, and guidance for how advisors conduct financial planning, specifically incorporating Northwestern Mutual’s Financial Planning Philosophy (FPP). The objective is to ensure financial planning drives overall corporate objectives and aligns with Northwestern Mutual’s strategy for both field operations and clients. The Lead Consultant is responsible for integrating the FPP into all planning content and ensuring all financial planning content produced by the Home Office is consistent with the FPP. This position also involves building insights with Home Office stakeholders to guarantee that all financial planning software, training, and other content developed for advisors and clients related to financial planning enhance client outcomes while supporting Northwestern Mutual’s broader corporate strategy.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree required.
• At least seven years of previous experience in areas where planning subject matter expertise was used.
• Minimum of 2 years of experience in financial services or advice or planning industry
• Knowledge and experience with Northwestern Mutual advisors, or other experience relevant to understanding Northwestern Mutual objectives required
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Familiarity with financial planning software is required
• Adaptive Communication: Formulates strategies to be used to convey complex information about services, products, systems, or processes to targeted audiences; communicates and liaises between technical and non-technical audiences.
• Analytical Thinking: Organizes and compares various aspects of a situation to comprehend and identify key or underlying complex issues through the use of quantitative data and analysis; leverages strong business acumen, problem solving, and interpersonal skills to think critically about situations from multiple perspectives and consistently seeks ways to improve processes.
• Business Acumen: Applies knowledge of both general and organization-specific business issues/financial implications for the organization to problem solve.
• Cross Functional Partnering & Planning: Facilitates collaboration, communication, coordination, and planning with individuals and teams from different functions within the organization, and who have different areas of expertise, to achieve common goals.
• Learning Agility & Critical Thinking: Pursues learning and obtains knowledge continuously in relevant fields, methods, or technologies in current and future practices; continuously utilizes critical thinking to identify opportunities, execute solutions, and measure impact to constantly improve existing practices and processes based on feedback, lessons learned, and market trends.

Nice To Haves

• Certifications or designations related to financial planning are preferred such as CFP®, CFA, ChFC, CLU.

Responsibilities

• Leading and supervising work of others on cross functional teams for ensuring that Northwestern Mutual corporate objectives and strategy are being integrated into PX financial planning software, and PX training and adoption materials.
• Overseeing work of others on cross-functional teams in developing requirements for PX planning software and content used by advisors regarding financial planning with responsibility for ensuring PX aligns with the FPP and planning best practices.
• Leading work overseeing cross-functional teams that analyze data related to financial planning and PX and developing insights and hypotheses regarding the role of financial planning by advisor and clients in driving Northwestern Mutual strategy.
• Leading and supervising work of others related to supporting for PX Engineering in providing use cases; assisting in developing and conducting user acceptance testing.
• Create financial planning standards and planning philosophy to ensure they reflect best practices and methods of planning, consistent with Northwestern Mutual strategy.
• Analyzing and research on methods of financial planning involving integration of insurance products in a financial plan for determining methods that deliver better outcomes for clients for purposes of informing planning best practices and developing strategy regarding financial planning.
• Preparing case studies on best practices for financial planning for use by Advisors or other stakeholders in preparing material for advisors, clients, home office stakeholders.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees