This article is about opportunity and hope in an industry that could do with more of both.
The opportunity is immense because right now, in the midst of difficult economic circumstances for so many of our citizens, the community has a greater need for trusted financial planning advice than at any other time since the industry’s inception.
Consequently, the financial advice industry in 2020 should be booming and positive about the future. Some advisers are in that position. In that context, they are embracing the evolution to professionalism and the creative challenges that process entails. These advisers have never been busier, more enthusiastic or more profitable.
Others are despondent and negative, bemoaning unnecessary regulations they feel are engulfing them, along with the greatly increasing cost of delivering advice which they see as squeezing their profitability and diminishing their motivation to continue in practice. It’s a sad and frustrating situation, but substantially of the industry’s own making.
This circumstance has been caused by decades of leadership failures in the industry, especially a reticence to promote through self-regulation the much needed reform of a deeply embedded and conflicted culture. These failures, culminating in the 2019 revelations of the Hayne Royal Commission and the 2020 FASEA Code of Ethics, represent the archetypal example of reaping what you sow.
Many industry leaders, on hearing Hayne’s stories of systemically bad behaviour in areas such as conflicts of interest and fees-for-no-service responded with words along these lines: “Yes, it’s bad, but there’s nothing new here, everyone knew about that already”. Therefore, it’s hardly surprising that these responses raised the question: “If you already knew about the bad practices, why didn’t you do or say something about them publicly?”
Hence, my point about leadership failures, not just once but many times over the last 40 years. These failures are especially egregious when they come from the leadership of so-called professional bodies who appear to see their role as protecting the commercial interests of fee-paying members (rather like trade unions or medieval guilds), instead of self-regulating their members’ behaviour in the public interest. In so doing, they either misunderstand the role of a profession in society or they choose to misunderstand it.
As always, I reserve a dishonourable mention for the leadership of my own profession of accounting. In 2013, the leaders of the profession deliberately diluted our publicly stated ethical standard on professionalism in financial advice in favour of supporting the continuation of conflicted practices that were later heavily criticised in the royal commission. This was done in the face of intense lobbying from dealer groups and noisy members who were seeking to retain the industry’s conflicted status quo. Even now, in 2020, the accounting bodies defend that decision, while claiming to promote the highest ethical and professional standards.
I submit that if it were not for this failure of leadership in the accounting profession, the financial advice industry would by now have become the true profession that it should be. Furthermore, the bureaucratic and compliance nightmare which the industry has now become would never have happened, the FASEA education and ethical standards would never have seen the light of day and the royal commission would have had little to say about the profession of financial advice.
Throughout this time a small number of brave financial advisers realised what had to be done and quietly proceeded to demonstrate their professional leadership without the involvement or endorsement of their membership bodies. The rather lame response of those bodies was to make constant reference to the industry’s (never-ending) journey towards professionalism, but without a clearly articulated destination, and to claim that they did not wish to become involved in members’ business models when that is precisely what they should be doing.
This brave (and growing) minority of members have shown the leadership that their professional bodies have never been willing to show. These members seized an opportunity from which they have never looked back, both professionally and commercially. For these advisers, the FASEA Code of Ethics is not a major imposition because they’ve been complying with those principles for years, well before FASEA was even contemplated.
And now there’s another opportunity. This time, it’s for the wider industry and it arises out of the FASEA Code of Ethics. That is, if the leadership of the industry were to take a genuinely supportive and constructive position on the spirit and substance of the Code (especially on the controversial standard 3), a strong case could be mounted for the removal of most of the compliance regime that has caused the despondency, negativity and unnecessary cost to which I referred earlier.
If that could be achieved, the cost of advice would significantly drop, the enthusiasm of advisers would increase, young people would join the new profession knowing that they could make a difference to the lives of Australians and many more members of the public would seek out truly professional financial advice that they could both afford and trust.
Having dealt with the opportunity, let’s move to the hope. The scenario I’ve outlined here is not (as some commentators have said) an idealistic and impossible dream. On the contrary, it is practical, achievable, sensible and most of all, it’s in the public interest. Other solutions, typically involving retaining existing regulations, simply won’t work. They’re like fitting square pegs into round holes.
How I would love to be in the privileged position of leadership within our professional bodies to promote this idea to policy makers. I believe they would be most receptive to any serious, workable and practical recommendations about cutting bureaucratic impediments to economic activity while concurrently improving the industry’s behaviour and the lot of consumers. That would be a “win/win/win” outcome for the financial advice industry, for consumers and for government. No unpleasant political compromises would be required by any stakeholders. That would be a truly remarkable and unprecedented result.
I’m not standing for office, just expressing the sincere hope that others who are in those influential positions of leadership will use their time in office to show the vision and courage to grasp the opportunity created by the FASEA Code of Ethics to evolve the financial advice industry into the profession it should be.
Thanks Robert, strongly support your position. At a time when more and more retirees need truly independent and unconflicted advice it is amazingly disappointing that they cannot obtain it without huge effort and that the professional body does not have the guts to enforce their own Code. They could be in a position where consumer organisations would promote their members to one and all. Instead we re forced to warn against this. Years ago the Accountants had the same opportunity which they briefly embraced and we supported, then self interest led to a reversal and we had to do as we do now warn our members and all older Australians against them. Sad all round and invites further government intervention between now and the next election, which I believe SCOMO is up to.
Robert, you continue with your rhetoric about the findings of the Royal Commission and the lack of fortitude by, it seems, everyone with the exception of a golden few.
You are wrong on so many fronts and have been wrong from the very first comments you have made in areas you have little knowledge in.
You have articulated that there were and still are issues, however your idolisation of a Royal Commission that was based on data that focused only on the bad and did not recognise the many good aspects, yet wanted to throw the entire Industry under the bus, shows you have blinkers on.
Your idealism, borders on a Utopian ideal that works in your mind, though sadly, does not hit the mark in the REAL world.
Everyone has the right to their opinion, though if you are picked up on areas that you are clearly ill-informed on, yet continue to promote, it shows the same arrogance that the Industry had to live with, with the Big end of town, when they refused to listen to reason and kept pushing their agenda, which nearly pushed us all of a cliff.
May I suggest you take off your rose coloured glasses and in the future, when you make comments, bring them back to a relevance within a sector, rather than your broad brush attack on everyone, who you seem to think are either conflicted or not.
The world is much more complicated than your comments past and present, so next time, let us see a more realistic attempt, rather than what we have read to date, which has thrown up many contradictions and very few realistic, commercial realities.
Great article Robert.
I echo your sentiment. The burying of heads in sand; and turning away and outside of ourselves when, as an industry, we should have been looking inward is a sad tale. It is a shame (and somewhat embarrassing) it had to be ‘forced’ upon us – but now it is here we all need to own it, stand in it and take pride in the results and opportunities it brings. Enough with the whining and bemoaning a “golden age” that only served a few. Let’s get on with the practice of accountability, respectability and also the profitability that professionalism brings.
Terrific article Robert, thankyou.
The sad reality is that for many of us, we only retain the financial planning industry association membership “just in case it is needed” as in the ticket to the Code Monitoring Authority.
It has never represented value for money and neither has the Accounting professional body membership.
You are very right to say, we need to take the challenge individually however, that requires organisation. Genuine member focused organisation
Robert Brown has again hit the nail on the head about ethics and professionalism in the financial planning industry.
I was however a little uncertain about the link between the accounting profession adopting a non conflicted option in 2013 and how that would have changed the whole profession. If the CAs had adopted those standards in 2013 the accountants practicing in financial planning would have had a leg up in terms of their own behaviours over their counterparts in other parts of the industry.
At the end of the day the institutional players ( banks, AMP etc.) had a lot of influence in the industry and promoted the fee for no service practices as a means of making easy money. The path we are now on would have likely happened anyway.
What always surprised me was that the role of monitoring the FASEA code of ethics was left to the dealer groups to educate and enforce the code. I thought this was a major backward step. Leaving some of the main players in the fee for no service strategy to enforce the attributes of professionalism, ethics and removal of conflicts was a bit like leaving the keys of the asylum to the inmates.
As these players are being slowly weeded out there is hope for the profession to emerge as a strong and ethical one and assist the community with the financial help that they all need.
Beautiful construct of facts. I recently ran for FPA Board for the exact reasons outlined in your article (to stop tolerating the bullshit pushback on cleaning up a sector that has ‘run its own race’ for too long). It’s not rocket science to be (not act &/or talk) professionally however it will mean missing out on money (the real driver of grubby behaviour) along the way.