Spina leads sales, business development, relationship management, training and service teams covering broker-dealers, banks and RIAs. Previously, he oversaw strategic marketing, which included strategic relationships for financial institutions. He spoke with writer Elizabeth Wine about issues he views as even more are important than investment insight.

1. What changes have you noticed in investors' behavior since the market meltdown?
The biggest change is that investors took on a more conservative posture, specifically a higher allocation to short-term fixed income. And while that hampered their ability to achieve long-term investing goals, we're now starting a modest and healthy migration back into equities this year, into a more diversified and productive long-term portfolio. We've guided advisors to help their clients make that shift back into a more productive long-term posture, with globally diversified asset allocation.

2. Why push global investments now if clients are still nervous?
Approximately 50% of the world's market cap exists outside the U.S., but the average U.S. investor has just 15% of their assets invested in international equities. That suggests that there's substantial room to increase U.S. investors' allocation to international stocks. That's a healthy movement. It gives clients the opportunity to benefit from a more diverse portfolio with exposure to different regions, sectors and types of companies. Where we spend a lot of time is helping advisors to better understand the benefits of global investing and to help them have those conservations with their clients. People tend to invest in companies and markets they're most familiar with.

3. How do you help advisors deal with anxious clients?
We try to arm them with more insight and case studies. We also give them a tool that will help stimulate and guide client conversations, a guide to behavioral finance. It is designed to educate advisors about a lot of behavioral biases that their clients will exhibit. We've done a lot of research on this. We wrote the book ourselves and we draw from well-known research and the publishing of behavioral scientists like Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for Economics [in 2002]. We've coupled that with our experience with advisors and weaved it together into something accessible for the advisor that's practical. We're trying to educate advisors to talk to their clients about these issues by providing them with steps and tools to ensure a better, long-term productive allocation for their portfolios.

4. What are the steps and tools?
We'll go into a branch and ask a group of advisors to bring to us challenging situations they experience with clients or prospects on a day-to-day basis. Based on pre-work and diagnostic work we do with the advisor, we're able to say this particular client or prospect is exhibiting this bias. The tool is matching the client or prospect with a bias and the step is to move the client from that bias behavior to a more productive allocation.

5. Do clients accept the recommendations?
Not universally. Some clients resist. We suggest advisors describe a common bias that is not unique to the client. They tell the clients they've had others with similar experiences and they've had success with moving them to a different place. It helps to depersonalize it. We've definitely seen results. As much as there is information out there, it's behavior that more often drives advisor and client success. If we can help advisors better understand the behavior basis of their clients, that's more helpful than investment insights.