The Financial Planning Association’s (FPA) Beyond the Shadow Shopper road show has rolled into Sydney to tackle what chief executive Mark Rantall calls “an issue of national importance”.
About 260 people, predominantly financial advisers, attended the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and FPA-hosted workshop yesterday morning, May 8.
The Sydney event, the second in a series of national road shows that began in Brisbane last week, is a response to the 2012 Shadow Shopper Report, commissioned by ASIC, which found just two of 64 financial plans surveyed could be described as “good”.
ASIC’s Nick Coates pointed out that the “adequate” band held the broadest range of plans and that, in most cases, only a modest improvement was needed to migrate from “adequate” to “good”.
Attendees were presented with a hypothetical case study to analyse, which contained both good elements and serious deficiencies, and asked to criticise the resulting Statement of Advice (SOA).
The financial advisers present quickly separated the good (considering alternative strategies), from the bad (poor strategic advice), while the ugly (referring to the client by the wrong name in the SOA) drew gasps of horror.
As with the Brisbane event, the planning audience raised the issue of sample size and some were unimpressed when it was made clear that neither the price of the advice nor the type of practice/licensee would be revealed.
One suggestion from the floor was that “ASIC should provide the advice for us”, while others questioned the future scope of scaled advice.
Rantall added that the term financial planner becoming enshrined in law by July 1, 2013 would address many of the issues facing the industry.
Good advice vs bad advice…well thanks to the budget, what was good advice 12 months ago is now bad advice…Come to think of it, I you paid for a plan that is now worthless/useless you would be pretty upset.