AXA FP is CoreData’s Licensee of the Year

Research firm CoreData has named the 2012 financial planning Licensee of the Year after surveying the attitudes and opinions of more than 1100 financial planners.

AXA FP beat two other licensees in the AMP group – Genesys and Charter – as well as Commonwealth Financial Planning and MLC/Garvan Financial Planning to claim the top honour.

The research firm canvassed the opinions of 1165 individual financial planners to gauge overall satisfaction with their licensee.

CoreData’s head of advice, wealth and super, Kristen Turnbull, says the research reveals which licensees are doing the best job of keeping their advisers happy.

“When we’re talking about the overall winners, that’s based on the satisfaction levels of their own network,” Turnbull says.

“It’s safe to say that those licensees are the best at satisfying the needs of their advisers.”

The CoreData research covers multiple service categories, including marketing support and communications, compliance support, technical services, para-planning, education and training, business planning, practice development managers (PDMs), research, remuneration, and acquisitions and succession.

It found that by far the most important part of the licensee’s offering in the current environment is compliance support.

CoreData crunches numbers

“When we take into account all of the different factors driving satisfaction, one quarter [24.77 per cent] of what is driving adviser satisfaction is coming from that one category,” Turnbull says.

This was followed by marketing support and communications (14.18 per cent), technical services (12.59 per cent) and the licensee’s PDMs (12.14 per cent).

The general manager of network development for AXA FP, Paul Williams, says that over the past 12 months the group has done “very comprehensive research” on what its practice principals need and has developed a clear picture of what they need.

This has meant “identifying their priorities for their business, and their key needs and what was most important for them, and then we focused our delivery on that aspect of it”, according to Williams.

“We have not materially changed our licensee-service offering in the last 12 months, other than enhancing it in relation to acquisition and succession [planning], and access to AMP Bank,” he says.

This contrasts with competitor licensees, some of whom have withdrawn practice finance facilities during the past 12 months, Williams says.

“But in some ways, the introduction of the AMP Bank and the enhancement of the acquisition and succession options has given practice principals more confidence to embark on expansion strategies,” he says.

Williams says that then translates into greater use of – and greater satisfaction with – other aspects of the service offering, such as marketing and communications and assistance with recruitment.

But he says that at its simplest, providing a satisfying service offering requires “being able to deliver on what you say”.

A full analysis of the CoreData Licensee of the Year research will appear in the June edition of Professional Planner magazine.