George Zammit arrived on a boat from Malta in 1955, aged 15, with eight pennies in his pocket. His mother’s plan had been to send the young George to Australia with the money he’d need to acquire an education. But George spent most of it on board the ship, so one of the first things he had to do upon disembarking at Port Melbourne was find someone to lend him some.

Zammit didn’t complete a formal education, but fetched up in Innisfail, Queensland, after deciding there was money in sugar cane. At the age of 40, he met a financial planner; and eight weeks ago his life story took pride of place on the so-called George Wall at the Hillross CBD financial-planning practice on downtown Sydney’s Hunter Street.

Zammit’s experiences – in particular, his contact with financial planning and his articulation of what financial freedom means to him – is at the core of a strategy hatched by the AMP-owned licensee, Hillross, to revamp how financial planning is delivered.

At the front-end of the Hillross strategy is a deceptively simple question: “What’s your idea of financial freedom?” Zammitt’s idea of financial freedom was to travel around Australia with his “five-star wife” in a “five-star Winnebago”. He achieved that goal.

Client goals, front and centre

Hillross managing director, Hugh Humphrey (right), says the question has been framed in response to a growing view that a lot of financial planning is driven by compliance concerns, rather than by a focus on client goals and objectives.

Humphrey says posing the question at the beginning of the advice process moves the planner and client away from an opening conversation about what financial planners can’t do. Humphrey says that very often a client arrives with the perception of the financial planner as an investment expert, whose job it is to outperform a benchmark by a couple of percentage points a year.

Humphrey says the question puts the client’s goals front and centre. The very first thing the client and planner focus on is what the client’s needs are from the potential relationship.

And, he says, it provides a kind of benchmark against which the planner’s services and value proposition can be assessed – and it’s a benchmark that is uncoupled from the performance of investment markets.

The companies that are the best at what they do, according to Humphrey, don’t sell a product per se. They sell “the experience around the product”.

However, Humphrey says Hillross research has found that clients do not put their experiences with brands into “boxes”. If someone has a great experience with, say, BMW, then their experience with other manufacturers and products will be assessed against their BMW experience. In other words, in terms of delivering a satisfying and memorable customer experience, financial planning firms are up against some stiff competition.

The right outcome

Leah Hitchings, Hillross brand and communication manager, says consumers don’t buy what a company sells, they buy why a company is selling it.

She says the new approach will be to highlight real clients, and their ideas of financial freedom in advertising and materials that support Hillross financial planners.

It has commissioned a series of exclusive black and white “lifestyle” images to support the approach, and these will be used in Hillross offices, support materials, statements of advice (SoAs) and even on staff business cards, in addition to the advertising.

“Every firm can pick and choose the appropriate imagery that suits their clients and their business,” Humphrey says.

Paul Heanly, general manager of Hillross CBD – whose business card features a surfboard – says the approach of posing the lifestyle question to clients enables a financial planner to “move away from the noise of financial planning”.

“If I ask my clients about FoFA, they don’t know what I am talking about,” Heaney says.

“FoFA is an industry issue; it’s not ultimately going to deliver a better outcome for the client. They are focused on what is important to them… and dealing with FoFA is our issue, not theirs.”

Focusing on financial freedom asks the client to focus on “what I am trying to achieve”.

“The client and the adviser can then start to engage with that,” Heanly says. “And the challenge for us then is that we need the right planners.

“It moves us out of the realm of issues around, even to an extent, asset allocation, management-expense ratios, platforms, equities. They are just tools that we need… so we can deliver the right outcome.”

 

One comment on “Client needs up front at Hillross”
    Sarah Blakeway

    Good article.

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