Two former Genesys Wealth advisers Dieter Tode and Travis Martin have set up their own financial planning business inside Perth-based practice The Wealth Designers (TWD).
Tode and Martin, co-principal planners of the business, met while employed at Wealth Plus Solutions, formerly an authorised representative of Genesys before the AMP licensee was wound up in February.
Prior to this, Wealth Plus belong to the Commonwealth Bank-owned Australian Financial Services licensee Financial Wisdom, and has now joined Westpac-owned licensee Magnitude.
After spending around five years each working as employees of these institutionally-owned licensees, they both felt their prior firm was heading in a direction that differed from where they wanted to go.
“That’s the struggle you face with the dealer groups. As they stand, their focus is still so much on product distribution.
“If you want to be doing something different, to change the perception of advice in Australia, you can’t just do things the way they’ve always been done. The dealer group models around…overlaying more and more systems and processes designed around product distribution is never going to be able to change the perception of advice in Australia,” Martin says.
Having made the decision to set up their own advice business, the next choice they faced was whether to build their own practice or to partner with an established practice.
“From a client experience point of view, [we asked ourselves] do we really want to go and set up our own office, our own website, all that side of things?” Tode says.
While their new home The Wealth Designers is still affiliated with a bank – its AFS licensee RI Advice is owned by ANZ – their experience with this practice has been very different. “The licensee for us…wasn’t a massive consideration at all. The consideration for us was around building those systems and processes…whether to design all that ourselves, or essentially to be able to plug into what TWD had already built,” Martin says.
“That’s just been eye-opening, from our point of view. When you’re all working towards the same sort of client outcomes, not the goal of building up $10 million of FUM,” Dieter says.
The two planners often either start or finish each other’s sentences, something which hints at their enthusiasm, likemindedness and closely aligned advice philosophies. They are passionate about serving clients and in providing a real service rather than simply recommending products.
Martin and Tode work on a fee-based approach, which is priced according to the individual level of complexity, not on a percentage of assets or FUM. “The focus is on making sure that everything the client has in their circumstances that needs to be addressed is addressed,” Martin says.
The pair highlight their detailed client engagement as a defining difference: “to understand the granular detail, to speak to both parties [husband and wife], and the proposal or engagement with them is based on what their goals are.”
“We confirm we know exactly what the client is working toward, confirm what areas need to be addressed over the coming year, and the cost if they want to hire us.
“We think that process is not only more thorough than what we traditionally encountered from other advice firms, but also, it’s a bit broader in scope than a lot of advice firms would have taken on,” Martin says.
