Six months after the launch of the NOW Financial Group, the boutique advice co-op has grown to eight member practices and has received expressions of interest in joining the group from “a similar number of firms from around the country”, according to NOW’s lead director, Perry Wilkey.
NOW was set up in December 2011 when a group of five Financial Services Partners (FSP) practices broke away from the ANZ-owned licensee.
Wilkey says the NOW firms were among FSP’s largest practices, but were growing increasingly tired of effectively subsidising services provided to other smaller firms operating under the FSP licence.
“That’s where the co-op thing came in,” Wilkey says.
“The way the aligned [adviser] models are, the largest firms end up bearing the majority of the load. That’s not just ANZ – everyone is like that.”
Under the NOW model, all practices pay their own costs but use the combined power of the co-op to derive the best pricing and to drive the best deals for clients.
“If you come into the group, if you’re using Xplan or Coin, we don’t care,” he says.
“You can use it, but you pay for it.”
Wilkey says it was a revelation to the NOW directors that they could source support services and infrastructure often at a better price than had been available through an institutionally aligned licensee.
“We learned a lot,” he says.
“And we got more and more angry as we went along. It’s amazing how naïve we were.
“So all these different opinions coming out [about FoFA], it’s because we just don’t know. And it’s not in the big guys’ interests for us to know.
“I don’t believe we were well represented by the product manufacturers that we were supposed to be working with or for. Whatever they negotiated was for them, not for us.”
Wilkey says each member form is an equal shareholder in the group.
“All things are equal – it does not matter how big you are,” Wilkey says.
In an e-mail to Professional Planner Online Wilkey said that NOW’s “future growth trajectory may see this morph into something more corporatised in the future”.
“Thus, [the] core ‘dealer’ service proposition at present is to provide the AFSL to serve as a ‘clearinghouse’ for likeminded firms,” he said.
“NOW is about a collaborative approach, sharing of ideas and best practice, brand retention and a distinct ‘no dickheads’ policy.”
Wilkey said the “primary focus of our practices is to deliver quality and personalised advice to their clients”.
“It is therefore important that the advisers have access to the services and solutions they need to be able to deliver this advice efficiently and to be able to add value without having to worry about the other elements of running a business,” he said.
“Our culture is one of sharing ideas and resources with our practices and we believe that our business model helps achieve the best results through the support structure we have built.”
NOW has 28 advisers in all states except Tasmania, about $1 billion of client funds and about $16 million of in-force insurance business.
