“Seeing their anxiety wash away” – why Ty Cockle loves advice

Ty Cockle, chief executive officer of Financial Foundations Australia (FFA) initially wanted to be a teacher, and trained to be one, but it was difficult to escape the pull of the family business. The son of renowned Victorian adviser John Cockle, he found the conversations of his childhood inexorably pulled him back to advice.

“I’ve always been interested in the financial side of life; it was difficult not to be, given the family connection,” says Cockle, 42. “Dad got us interested in investing, and growth assets, from young age. We were always talking about it.

“The other thing that I can see now was a big influence on me was how Dad just gets such a kick out of helping our clients. Financial advice is really about deep human relationships, and our firm has always been so big on that. I get that same kick, and so do all of our people.”

This will always be the unique selling proposition (USP) for financial advisers, says Cockle: that “making smart, money decisions can be elusive for a lot of people.”

“Quite often, we see clients come in – particularly new clients – and they’re very anxious, because they don’t really know what to do. Giving these clients a roadmap that enables them to see their financial future, and seeing their anxiety wash away – whether that takes one meeting or six or seven meetings – is extremely rewarding.”

Because it still receives some trailing commissions on legacy insurance products, FFA is not allowed to use the vexed term “independent” – but it holds its own licence and charges a fixed fee. FFA is one of the largest boutique financial planning practices in Australia, and for more than thirty-five years, it has helped high-net-worth individuals, families and businesses with bespoke financial advice and wealth management solutions.

Some – not all – of the difficulties that the industry has experienced in recent years had “been apparent for some time,” Cockle says, and five years ago, FFA put a lot of work into reorganising its business to position itself for the changing environment.

“For us, it was all about saying, ‘how can we be totally focused on the client?’ To do that, you’ve got to outsource everything that you can away from the desk of the advisers, so that they can truly be that. It means taking all of the administration off their desks; it means having more of a rigorous approach around your investment committee and how you use asset consultants; it means investing in technology, investing in the client experience, all of those things. We made a decision some years ago to really reduce our client-per-advisor load, which has been a good decision.”

The ideal situation, says Cockle, is to have a model where your administrators administer, your fund managers manage money, and your advisers advise. “It means that our advisers can focus on the advice piece, and how they deliver our services to the client, without anxiety. In turn, that helps our clients to be comfortable,” he says.

As part of the “constant” focus on the client experience, FFA recently started working with Invesco Consulting on the language – verbal and body – that helps advisers communicate with clients in a way that clients understand, and to which the clients relate.

“We started this as just a different kind of professional development, that is complementary to our technical development,” Cockle says. “We want to provide an avenue both for personal and professional growth for our advisers, and this has been really helpful.”

FFA chose to run its sessions with Eleece Quilliam, national manager of Invesco Consulting in Australia, late on a Friday afternoon, as part of the weekly wind-down. “We have a chat with Eleece, she takes us through a presentation, but then the advisers go through a few experiences we had that week and how they unfolded, with Eleece, and she tells us what she thinks. It’s quite an interactive experience, but it can be fun – we have a laugh, but it’s also serious, and you start to see how crucial things like language and body language are for the client. It’s a little bit outside the square, but we find that our advisers see very real benefits from it, quite quickly.”

If practice says that it is “client-focused,” but it is not doing something like what Invesco Consulting offers, it really isn’t really client-focused at all, Cockle feels. “You could have the best information in the world, and the best strategy, but if you’re not communicating it properly, in a way that truly engages the clients, all that effort is totally wasted,” he says.

James Dunn

James is an experienced senior journalist and host of The Inside Network's industry events.