Dover Financial Advisers increases compliance team

Dover Financial Advisers has identified the need for more compliance team members to accommodate the AFSLs continual levels of growth. “Rather than having business development managers promoting vertically integrated solutions, Dover prefers to use its workforce to ensure comprehensive supervision and technical support is being provided in a timely manner”, says Peter Thompson, Dover’s adviser manager.

Dover recently added an additional compliance team member to meet the growth in authorised representatives around Australia and have already identified the need for at least 2 more new compliance officers within the next 3-6 months. Mr Thompson believes AFSLs have a responsibility to their advisers and their clients, first and foremost to focus on the appropriateness of advice, with the importance of a product- based solution being a secondary consideration. “Our commitment to our advisers and their clients is to ensure we provide the most robust compliance program possible. This starts with advisers understanding our standards and responsibilities, as well as the need for SOAs to be articulated a certain way.”

Dover emphasises that information presented to clients should be personalised in a short, concise and effective manner, no more than 20 pages, and as few as 6 pages. Feedback from our advisers supports shorter SOAs provide a clearer plain-English document for clients to read and most importantly, for them to understand. 70 page software-driven SOAs do not communicate effectively and most certainly by length and repetitiveness, do not meet the requirement of being short, concise and effective.