Industry

The bureau’s financial advice role definition is not up to scratch, the FAAA says, and conflates the role of a financial adviser with an investment adviser. A new setup will help better inform industry, the community, and even potential new advisers about the profession.   

Knowing how much personality to inject into a professional advice veneer is a skill that needs to be learnt by all advisers, but practices also have a role to play in setting up the right systems, processes and cultural settings so that advisers are comfortable being their true self.

If managers present a fund that has a convoluted structure and can’t be described with clarity and transparency, what hope does an adviser have in then explaining it to their clients?

While the minister has remained relatively mute on the obvious issues with the CSLR, he will at least allow the association to discuss the scheme’s flaws with Treasury at some point.

Over half of asset managers in the US offer “business consulting resources” to the growing registered investment adviser cohort. Whether advisers actually want these services is debatable, but the trend seems to be gaining traction.

Appropriately enough, it took a regulatory breakdown to finally ruffle the policy chief’s feathers. In the first of a series of whitepapers aimed at collating the issues, Phil Anderson lays bare the failures of government, ASIC and E&P Financial Group.

The three-way tie-up highlights just how much the power dynamic has shifted across the advice landscape over the last decade, with advice ownership groups arguably superceding licensees in the pecking order.

Licensees were given a month to clean up the information they provided to ASIC about adviser qualifications and training. That time is up, and enforcement action is not off the table.

There’s a pattern to the way adviser numbers oscillate around the end of the financial year, but there’s nothing common about the movement in the licensee sector at the moment.

The average financial adviser is older and brings in more revenue than they did a year ago, but that hasn’t translated into a fatter salary according to data from Adviser Ratings.

There are several aspects to the treatment of the case that don’t add up, the association’s policy lead says, and a transparent public inquiry is more than warranted.

As platform technology develops, the race to become the one dominant platform for Australian advisers is just heating up. In the US, it’s already well underway, with the number of advisers consolidating platforms rising more than 50 per cent in four years.