The Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) will focus on improving internal operations and developing its embryonic code of practice in the coming months, according to the association’s president, Brad Fox.
Fox says the AFA is aiming for “operational excellence” in its back office, “and becoming more efficient so we can deliver more and more services in a better way”.
Fox says the AFA’s recently released Principles of Practice is “very ethically based; less prescriptive than perhaps others”, and its aim is “to get the mode of thinking right” within the membership.
He says that until the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) issues regulatory guidance on what it takes to be a code-issuing body, “there’s no point us getting to a finished document”.
“We’re only going to have to redo the work,” Fox says.
“So we’ve put this out for people to see the way we’re approaching it, and the ethics basis in it, and we want that feedback.”
Fox says negotiations about the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) negotiations were “long, tedious [and] mostly disappointing”, and the AFA did not achieve enough through the process.
He says the AFA was instrumental in “key wins” in the areas of commission payments on risk business.
Fox says “I don’t know that there’s a true ‘win’” in being able to obviate the need to comply with the FoFA opt-in proposal, because any professional code that eliminates the need for members to comply will have to be more stringent than the law.
But he says the AFA stayed “very, very true to our belief” through the FoFA process.
“Some say you didn’t trade anything off,” he says.
“Well, no we didn’t because we came in with where we believe good policy sits, in the interests of consumers and sustainable advice practices. To compromise on that to achieve other outcomes – not the style of the AFA.”
