Meller says that last year, AMP launched a pilot program in Parramatta of “an AMP-branded office that’s actually in retail space, where there are 20 desks for financial planners to work from, obviously with all the office suites you need and meeting rooms to meet clients”.
“All of the support services are in that office space as well, and the financial planner rents from us the desk space, the full capability, for them to be able to service their client base,” he says.
“So they’ve got all of the back office provided by AMP, for a fee they pay every year; they’re provided [with] a customer base, they’ve been through the training program, and they’re pretty well set for success. They can focus on servicing their clients and growing their client base. We’ve been very pleased with that; we’ll be rolling it out further and we’ll be announcing, fingers crossed, a second centre in one of the other capital cities very shortly, and we’d expect to continue rolling that out in AMP going forward.”
Meller says there’s no doubt that the bureaucracy flowing from wave after wave of legislative change in financial planning has “become one of the negative points of being in the industry”.
“But the planners I speak to love the industry they work in,” he says.
“They genuinely believe – and I believe too – that they make a real difference in people’s lives. I think that gives a great deal of job satisfaction.”
