Watching the English football team struggling to get to grips with Costa Rica last week, an odd parallel emerged between England’s exit from the 2014 FIFA World Cup, and the current state of the financial planning industry in Australia.
When England drew 0-0 with Costa Rica early on Wednesday morning, and departed the tournament not with a bang but a whimper, the post-mortem was already well underway into what went wrong. But what do they mean by wrong?
What I say next I say as an England fan and supporter: How many times must a team be knocked out of a tournament in the group stages (or shortly thereafter) before it is recognised not as unusual (or “early”, as the British press tends to put it), but in fact as completely normal?
What if England’s true place in the global football firmament is to get knocked out in the group stages? Making the World Cup finals is an achievement and all the available evidence – years and years and years of never really going much further – might just be a signal that a team of England’s ability may not be able to wish for very much more. It has no god-given right to be the best in the world, no matter how much it wants to be. Just wishing won’t make it so.
Which brings me to financial planning, and the oft-repeated mantra that only two-in-10 people use financial planning services, and that number needs to be higher.
What I say next I say as someone who believes fundamentally in the ability of good financial planning to make a real difference in people’s lives: If you have a service that the majority (8 out of 10) of the public doesn’t use, maybe you actually have a service that is worthless to them. Maybe it’s not the public’s fault that more of them do not use it and maybe they don’t just need to be educated about what it is.
What if they’ve looked, seen what’s going on – the Commonwealth Financial Planning debacle is only the most recent thing they’ll have noted – and come to a considered conclusion that financial planning simply is not something they want anything to do with. Isn’t that at least a possibility? Financial planning has no god-given right to reach any wider an audience than it currently does, no matter how much it wants to. Just wishing won’t make it so.
The England team’s natural place might be to exit World Cups in the group stages; and the financial planning industry’s natural market penetration might be about 20 per cent.
This might be as good as it gets. It’s certainly something worth thinking about.
If you want a different result, you have to do something different. If England wants its football team to do better, it has to invest in the grassroots of the sport, foster technical excellence and create an environment where the very best players can thrive and succeed. Then it has a fighting change of staying tournaments longer.
And if Australia wants its financial planning profession to reach more people, it has to rethink its relationship with those people – invest in the grassroots of a genuine profession, foster technical excellence and create an environment where the very best practitioners can thrive and succeed. Then it has a fighting chance of increasing the number of people who use it. Until every single practitioner is serious about that, it will continue to struggle to win a bigger audience.
At least the England team didn’t score any own-goals. The same can’t be said of the financial planning industry.
My money is on the Netherlands.
Simon, I must respectively disagree. Unlike the English soccer team we are in a much better shape than we were. We, prospectively, now have no commissions, no volume rebates, we have a codified best interest duty and the overt awareness of it, we have Fee Disclosure statements, we are moving towards greater qualifications for advisers, we have a requirement to be part of the TPB for tax advice,we are constantly having the professionalism debate which can only lead to a more professional industry. The intent of FoFA is still there and will evolve over time further.The issues we hear about in the industry are all pre FoFA. Many hard working advisers , who put their houses on the line for overdrafts to employ many Australians were doing the right thing and with their clients interests at heart. Retrospectivity should not be considered just because there were few who did the wrong thing and abused the system. Yes I said few as proportionately it was! Its about time commentators gave this a chance to work. I think you will be surprised about the outcome. BTW what are the media doing about product failures and requesting major reforms there. I can hear the crickets or is that the English sobbing.