A tireless campaigner of responsible investing, professional standards and free advice for the needy and vulnerable, Paul Harding-Davis will retire after 47 years in the industry.
For the past eight years, Harding-Davis has been the general manager of boutique AFSL, AdviceIQ Partners and will be succeeded by John Sullivan, a former head of Macquarie’s Virtual Adviser Network, on 3 April.
But throughout his career, Harding-Davis had around a dozen other key roles. He has worked for organisations including Zurich, Australian Ethical Investment and Premium Wealth Management (which acquired by Australian Unity in 2014 and sold to Entireti in 2024).
Harding-Davis started his career, as many do, at Colonial Mutual in the late 1970s. It wasn’t his love of banking that attracted him to financial services, it was his love of basketball. Back then, the imposing 6’4” power forward was playing for the Franklin Bears in the Victorian Basketball Championship, the country’s toughest competition at the time.
A basketball contact got him the job at Colonial.
“I was 18 and playing First Division but only the American imports and a handful of Aussies were being paid so everyone else needed a job,” he tells Professional Planner.
He recalls guarding Australian basketball legend Lindsay Gaze in his debut game, before graduating to his son Andrew, another Australian basketball icon, later in his career.
“[Lindsay] was in his forties, and he towelled me – if they had a three-point line it would’ve been worse,” Harding–Davis says. The three-point line was introduced into Australian basketball after 1984.
But it was during the later playing years in his career that he started working in financial services and doing study on the side.
“Around [age] 25 and 26, it hit me that I needed to start thinking about life after basketball.”
It turned out to be a timely revelation.
After suffering a series of debilitating injuries, including stress fractures, vertebrae disc lesions and chronic knee pain, Harding-Davis retired (for the first time) at age 28.
After Colonial, he went on to work in a small financial planning firm, providing advice on superannuation and insurance.
“I’ve seen a lot of change in the past 47 years, and I’d say a pattern of change,” he says.
“Every ten years, there are a major set of changes, with medium-sized changes in between.
Every set of major changes is usually accompanied by an unnecessary amount of panic. There are people who cry Armageddon but if you look back at the so-called Armageddons we’ve had, each time the industry has come out stronger and better.”
Giving back
Behind the scenes, Harding-Davis has also selflessly volunteered his time to worthy causes. He was on the board of the Responsible Investment Association Australasian for seven years and helped establish the Pro-bono Financial Advice Network, of which he will remain a director until an appropriate successor is found.
He credits Professional Planner for inspiring the formation of the Pro-bono Financial Advice Network, which he says is one of his proudest career achievements.
It was a presentation at the 2014 Professional Planner Dealer Group Summit – an annual event now known as the Licensee Summit – that highlighted the opportunity for an industry-wide collaboration focused on the provision of pro-bono advice to those in need, specifically those suffering a personal health crisis.
“I was at Premium at the time and I was so inspired that I wanted to get [Premium] involved but we were too small to do it alone,” Harding-Davis says.
Instead, he spoke to Conexus Financial founder and managing director Colin Tate AM to help create the initiative.
At the very next Dealer Group Summit, Harding-Davis and Steve Helmich, then executive director for financial planning at AMP, presented their vision for a pro-bono advice service.
“At the end of our presentation, I asked who would like to join us and to our great happiness, about a dozen dealer heads put up their hand,” he says.
“We held our first meeting in the Conexus office and within a few months, we had set up a company and constitution.
“We took our time to build it up properly and safely from the start, recognising that we could potentially do more harm than good if we didn’t get it right. Today, it’s in a strong position, led by Nicola Beswick with an impressive board.”
Advancing the profession
Not only did Harding-Davis help on the philanthropic side of advice, but he helped drive the professionalism agenda at Professional Planner contributing four years on the publication’s advisory board from approximately 2012 to 2016.
“I ended up on the board at a really interesting time for the industry, alongside the likes of Grahame Evans, Steve Helmich, Tom Reddacliff and Annick Donat,” he says.
“We’d get together quarterly and have really good, productive conversations about the future of advice. They were some of the best conversations and I feel very fortunate to have been part of discussions about, not only the industry, but about what we could and should do to advance the profession.”
Unfortunately, advice is still not recognised as a bona-fide professional yet. This was something that Harding-Davis hoped would happen before he hung up his boots.
“We’ve made enormous progress towards professionalism but there are still some important things that need to happen in order for advisers to be regarded in the same way that accountants and doctors are,” he says.
“When people walk into a doctor’s office, they don’t ask about a doctor’s qualifications, and doctors don’t talk about their qualifications. People just trust that they are a professional and I think we still have some way to go before the community accepts that advisers are professionals.”
That said, Harding-Davis is convinced that there has never been a better time to be a financial adviser, and he is thrilled that one of his sons is on the verge of becoming an adviser, having just completed his professional year.
“Regardless of the complexity and challenges facing the industry at the moment, this is a truly wonderful time for advice,” he says.
“We need to encourage more young people to enter this great, emerging profession. Spread the word.”