“When you hear the term “Financial Consulting” or “Finance Consultant”, as Singaporeans,
the first few impressions that come to our mind are the persistent agents that stops you in shopping center when you are having dinner at Jurong Point or when you simply taking the MRT from Boon Lay Station.
Our instincts when we see a red banner/stand is naturally to take a longer detour to get to the next point or brave through the “Hi, can you help us do a quick survey?”, the “Have you started working?” and yada yada.
We all thought that there was no way which they could intrude our personal life in the comforts of our home, as the saying goes “when there’s a will, there’s a way”. As the world undergoes a digital transformation, the insurance industry, not one to be left in the dust, has formulated innovative means to “help us get rich” or guilt-tripping us into thinking we are not doing enough for ourselves or our family.
Let’s be honest here, our social media are flooded nowadays by those very same agents and the content is pretty typical; either them flaunting their successes and wealth or the up-and-coming “advisers” trying to flex their investment knowledge and bombarding your newsfeed with market news and interactions with clients.
Having a curious mind in investment/finance, I actually do not mind the “financial consultants” as they are actually a good source of market news if you do your fact check.
But oh boy, did my views change drastically after my interaction with this particular financial advisor from NBS, he is persistently posting “advice” or “101 tutorials” on his IG/LinkedIn, they are basically investment nuggets and tips.
Initially, he shared some really interesting topics online and I found them engaging as I do have a strong interest in the field of finance/investment. I tried to google certain topics that he has shared for my own learning purpose. Hell no, the financial advisor must have wished that I wasn’t that much of a “busybody” (but I prefer the term curious).
I discovered that this particular financial advisor has been very kindly providing his finance/investment advice from other sources online, without referencing or paraphrasing them. It is a literal copy and paste. ALL of his LinkedIn posts are copied. I always thought that NTU is a top-rate educational institution, which really made me think about how he has managed to pass his modules in NBS given that students are not encouraged to copy works of others due to plagiarism.
What really takes the cake is the fact that he passes off this “advice” as his own and heck, he even have clients/followers thanking him for the advice!
Personally, I used to have nothing against these agents as I always believe that everyone in one way or another is just trying to survive, you got to do what you got to do.
Being a student, we definitely have peers or classmates who are “financial consultants”, and we should not fault them for calling themselves consultants as not everyone is good enough to be a BlackRock Banker or join a top and legitimate consulting firm.
It takes courage to pretend to be something else you are not.”