Advisers’ satisfaction with licensees is high, yet they remain hesitant to recommend their licensee to other advisers, according to the latest research from CoreData.
Presenting its annual licensee satisfaction data to the Professional Planner Licensee Summit, the researcher found 79 per cent of advisers are “satisfied” with their licensee, with 16 per cent professing to be “neutral” and 4 per cent “not satisfied”.
CoreData global CEO Andrew Inwood told the summit, held in the NSW Blue Mountains earlier this week, that licensee satisfaction is at record levels but the “battle for likeability” is real.
“Everyone’s happy, everyone’s making money, they can see the growth, so everyone’s relatively happy at the moment,” Inwood said.
Gaining high net promotor scores (NPS) across the board is still a “struggle”, Inwood said, and the research found only 48 per cent of advisers would give a high NPS to their licensee.
“Would you recommend your licensee to other people? The common answer at the moment is ‘no’,” Inwood said.
“Don’t get too offended, because if I break that up by licensee and ask people do you like your licensee, would you stay there, the number jumps.”
When it comes to what is important to advisers, compliance, revenue, approved product lists, and education and training are top of the list.
“If you as a licensee focus on those four things…then the happiness of your cohort is going to rise relatively quickly and significantly so understanding that becomes critically important,” Inwood said.
Adviser demand for cyber support has risen. Around 65 per cent identified it as important in 2023 and that figure rose to 78 per cent in this year’s data.
“Everyone’s recognising what’s going on in cybersecurity, everybody’s worried about it and they’re trying to lean into and trying to solve it,” Inwood said.
“But it is enormously complex. The moment you’ve got someone working from home, the moment someone’s carrying around a laptop, the moment that someone’s doing all those things [it] becomes really problematic.”
Compliance support remains steady in satisfaction at 90 per cent, but business planning support, paraplanning services and marketing support garnered low satisfaction ratings.
Only 45 per cent of advisers are happy with their licensee’s business planning support, 33 per cent approve paraplanning services and marketing support.
The research found that some 85 per cent of practices with “strong growth plans” are happy with their licensee, but this falls to 77 per cent for firms with “general plans” and to 70 per cent of those who have other growth plans or are unsure of what their plans are.
“The clues to growth are really clear here – people who have strong plans are very happy with their licensees and that should be a really pleasing outcome to the licensees,” Inwood said.
“The people who really want to be there, who are leaning in and working hard, are very happy with the way things are going. The people who aren’t are finding it relatively problematic.”
The research also found platforms gradually eroding the value proposition of licensees by offering better tech and compliance tools.
For advisers considering switching licensee, 43 per cent want to go their own way and do it alone.
“Most commonly they’re trying to embrace the freedom of their own AFSL,” Inwood said.
For those willing to switch to another third-party licensee the leading alternatives are Centrepoint Alliance, Futuro, Lifespan, Fortnum Private Wealth and Wealth Today (each gaining the support of around 3 to 5 per cent of advisers).
Furthermore, the lines between platforms and licensees are continuing to blur as tech, support and compliance is more often provided by non-traditional players.
“Platforms and licensees are converging and that’s already happened in the UK and in the US,” Inwood said.
“Those two things are indistinguishable from each other now in so many ways which is very interesting.”
The research found being authorised by an third-party licence provider rather than being self-licensed correlated with greater satisfaction with adviser technology (56 per cent versus 48 per cent).
Externally licenced firms found greater satisfaction with how adviser technology improved overall business efficiency (57 per cent versus 49 per cent) as well as giving higher ratings to support from the provider’s help desk to resolve issues (52 per cent versus 43 per cent).
“The people working with the licence are fundamentally better at tech and they’re going to get those advantages earlier,” Inwood said.
