The challenges of using technology to deliver more advice to more people, while professionalising an industry and avoiding conflicts of interest dominated discussions at the 2013 Dealer Group Summit (DGS).
The summit, hosted by Professional Planner and held in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney in early June, quickly concluded that the key to establishing financial planning as a true profession will be to put clients’ interests front and centre at every single point of contact with individual advisers, licensees and product manufacturers.
That would require close examination of the industry structure in the wake of the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) reforms, the true meaning of “professionalism”, the role that technology can play in creating better efficiencies and the form in which advice is delivered to clients.
Divided into six groups to summarise the main issues of the DGS, delegates said that a key issue was vertical integration and “how to make the shift or facilitate the shift from an industry to a profession in an environment in which the ultimate controllers or owners of so many dealer groups are the boards of very large financial institutions, whose ultimate responsibility is to shareholders and the quarterly earnings they are reporting”.
“This issue has been described as ‘the elephant in the room’ so many times that by definition… it moves from being an elephant to something that people are happy to talk about openly,” the summary groups said.
The summary groups said there is an opportunity to revisit structural issues once the FoFA reforms are bedded down and operating.
“There’s an opportunity in the industry today, as we move past July 1, to really think about the way our businesses are structured… and the perceptions we leave with clients at the end of the day,” they said.
“So it’s a chance to turn the corner. And if we go back to three years ago at the first one of these summits, we were all talking about FoFA and going to government with some real purpose on FoFA. Now we’re at the final steps of its being introduced and attention needs to turn to the client and the experience that the client is getting out of it.
“If some of the opaqueness is removed and we can get moving in the conversation and at least have a standard response to the outside of the industry, that’s going to help promote the industry.”
