Fresh from its successful bid for financial planning business Centric Wealth, Financial Index Wealth Accountants (Findex) has launched an online advice offering.
Called Movo, the launch gives Findex presence in three key advice market segments: the high-net-worth segment through Centric; the mid-market through the Findex brand, which includes a telephone-based client service capability; and the direct advice market through the new business.
Movo has been in pre-release testing since January, and initially sought to attract new users thought a limited-time cut-price advice offer of $79 per financial plan. Following launch, the cost of a basic plan has been set at $199, a premium plan costs $249, and a deluxe plan costs $349.
Each option offers comprehensive and tailored advice, a financial roadmap report, and promises “quick turnaround”.
The premium plan adds adviser email access and a 30-minute telephone adviser planning session to review the roadmap. The deluxe plan includes the elements of the premium plan and adds an initial planning session and support to gather the necessary documents and information to complete the plan.
Inevitable step
Spiro Paule, chief executive officer of Findex, says the online delivery of financial planning services is an inevitable step in the expansion of the financial planning market.
“We believe that not enough people get advice,” Paule says.
“Less than one in five, less than 20 per cent of the population, gets regular financial advice, and we believe that’s an unhealthy situation – it’s unhealthy either because they do not have trust in the industry, or it’s just too expensive. Both of those are concerns that we’d like to fix.”
Paule says Findex has developed systems to enable the streamlining of individually tailored advice, and to deliver it at price that sits between what consumers say they are prepared to pay for advice, and what it traditionally costs to deliver, which can be as much as $2500 or $3000 per plan.
Movo is aimed at “the do-it-yourself investor who wants to go and get advice that they can rely on, online”, Paule says.
No existing relationships
He says it is not aimed at the existing clients of financial planners. Rather, it is aimed at those who have no existing financial planning relationship.
“The system is aimed at the four out of five people who don’t get advice, whose finances are becoming increasingly important as their superannuation account grows or there’s liabilities or their responsibilities grow,” he says.
“It’s young accumulators, young families – people with growing super balance. All these people should be going out and getting as much advice as they can to avoid the pitfalls of not planning.
“It’s fully online advice, produced with certified systems and processes and also involving Financial Index’s advice team, and that’s why we can offer it at a significant discount to the way advice is produced out in the market at the moment.”
Quality outcome
Paule says that if a user can “take the time to put their data in, they will certainly get a quality outcome back to advise them about their affairs”.
“It’s a very low-cost way to get some advice, particularly for people who feel their affairs aren’t too complicated – just sensible things to do to get yourself into good habits, to build wealth for the long term,” he says.
“We cut up the whole marketplace through these various strategies we have, and we aim to continue to push all of those independently of each other and build on them as we go along.”
Movo is a significant piece of organic growth for a company that has built a reputation for growth through acquisition and successfully integrating those acquisitions. Paule says Findex will continue along that path.
“Appropriate acquisitions will be made into each of those strategies,” he says.
“Obviously [with] the last one…we’re looking for the online user, but there are other places that required scaled advice, and by scaled I mean…you get full advice when you go to this online service, but there are other organisations out there who sell other products, like car insurance or health insurance or budgeting services or any of the organisations like Coles that want to branch out into financial services.
“This kind of product suits any of those people, because it’s a technologically slanted way to provide advice to a amass market, and make sure that it’s quality advice just like they would get if they were prepared to go and see somebody face to face. So that strategy for us is a big one for the future.
From top to toe
“We’ve spent six years building a system to be able to offer somebody full advice – not just ‘move your super’, but full advice from top to toe – all in one place, who’s got to go in there, spend a little bit of time putting their data in. The more accurate the data, the better the outcome will be and the more meaningful the advice will be, but it’s full advice to help them get on their way.”
Paule says the push into direct advice is designed to help cement Findex’s position as a non-institutional alternative to the big banks and AMP.
“We’d like to grow to make sure were are a healthy, competitive alternative to the banks and AMP,” Paule says.
“The fact is that there’s a need for that, just because there’s a consumer out there that looks for that, particularly the high-net-worth. The upscale market certainly looks for that, more of the than not, so we aim to be one of those alternatives.”
