Compliance

The Compensation Scheme of Last Resort, or CSLR, has become something of a lightning rod for the finance industry in 2022; and yet we are less than a month into the year. While almost every impacted party agrees on the importance of the new scheme, few can agree on who should pay for it, and…

Uncertainty has returned to the market after a bumper 2020, fuelled by persistent inflation and a pandemic that never really went away. But in its latest alternatives outlook, JPMorgan warns that investors “aren’t seeing the forest for the trees.” “Up close, the ‘trees’ in the 2022 outlook are clear,” writes Anton Pil, global head of…

On Wednesday, Dixon Advisory & Superannuation Services, the division of ASX-listed E&P Financial Group (ASX:EP1) that was focused on delivering financial advice to high-net-worth clients for several decades, filed for voluntary administration. This marks the beginning of the end for what initially appeared to be an Australian success story.  According to the ASX announcement, administrators…

Dissatisfied with the way in which financial advisers are being treated, the Association of Independently Owned Financial Professionals (AIOFP) has taken a stand, launching a political movement to voice their concerns. The body says, “the current Coalition government have unfairly targeted financial advisers for their own political purposes. Consumers have become collateral damage by either…

The soon-to-be-disbanded Financial Adviser Standards and Ethics Authority (FASEA) is finishing its reign with a flurry, announcing a review of the much-derided conflicts of interest Standard 3 of the recently enshrined law. Financial advisers and legal experts have raised concerns about the structure of the ethical standards sincetheir inception. In fact FASEA had received 37…

It’s a wonder that financial advisers have much time to actually provide advice to their clients in 2021. Following a whirlwind of regulatory changes, education requirements, platform outages and increased reporting, more time than ever is being spent on compliance. The latest in the string of regulatory changes is the “Design and Distribution Obligations,” or…

By now every adviser, licensee and paraplanner would be well aware of the impending changes to annual opt-in, consents and ‘lack of independence’ disclosures. Combine these with the impending product design and distribution obligations (DDOs) and varying fee consent requirements from every platform, and a busy year lies ahead for those advisers that remain. Late…

The corporate regulator, ASIC, has continued its busy start to the year, releasing three legislative instruments this week stemming from the recommendations from the Hayne Royal Commission. The subject of these latest releases, which will guide ASIC’s assessment of financial service providers, relates to the ‘written consent’ required for advisers to deduct fees from client…

This week the nation’s financial advisers received news that their annual registration fees, or “adviser levies.” would increase by the equivalent of 160% over the next two years. According to the regulator’s announcement, the total cost per retail advice licence is now $1,500 plus an additional $2,426 per authorised representative under the licence. This means…

The Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) was established in 1 November 2018, combining the Financial Ombudsman Service, Credit and Investments Ombudsman (CIO) and Superannuation Complains Tribunal (SCT) into a more efficient and well resourced group. Covering most aspects of the financial services industry, the data was naturally tilted towards complaints against the banking sector and…

It may be a lull between storms but the SMSF Association has no major political battle to contend with at the moment, instead focusing on smaller issues to do with regulatory change and embarking on new research about small funds’ performance in case that becomes an issue in future. John Maroney, the association’s chief executive,…

It was a busy day for the Federal Government, announcing the proposal to disband FASEA, introduce lack of independence disclosure requirements and then finally, introduce a new fee disclosure regime. Advisers had been hit with an increasingly complicated set of rules when it came to receiving fee payments from ongoing clients. A combination of grandfathering,…