A decade spent on improving its wealth offering has seen Morgans become the most valued licensee by advisers, according to the CoreData annual licensee research.
The licensee satisfaction survey found 98 per cent of Morgans advisers were satisfied with their licensee, with Lifespan and Infocus tied in second place with scores of 90 per cent.
Overall, 79 per cent of advisers report being “satisfied” with their licensee, an increase from 74 per cent the year before.
Morgans celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2022. Starting off as a stockbroking firm, it has since evolved into improving its holistic wealth offering.
“Certainly, a big part of our focus, really over the last 10 years, has been building out that offering for advisers to help with that,” Morgans chief executive and managing director James Macaulay tells Professional Planner.
CoreData consulting director Grahame Evans, who conducted the research and formerly lead GPS Wealth, says licensees don’t need to be the best in every category to make it to the top of the ratings and Morgans was strong across all main areas advisers valued.
“The thing that got my interest with them is the consistency across the board, because it’s rare,” Evans says.
“When I was on the other side of equation when I was running GPS Wealth, there were areas we needed to substantially improve on even though we might have won the award a couple of years. In the case of Morgans they were consistent across the board.”
CoreData’s research, presented to the Professional Planner Licensee Summit in June, found compliance, revenue, approved product lists and education and training are top of the list of what’s important to advisers from their licensees.
Demand for cyber support had also increased, with around 65 per cent identifying it as important in 2023 and that figure rising to 78 per cent in this year’s data.
“Cyber had the biggest increase in any of the categories,” Evans says.
Andrew Wilkie, director – branches for Morgans, says the evolution of the business has been driven by the needs of the clients first, which is then coupled to the needs of the advisers serving those clients.
“No adviser is prescribed to a particular model,” Wilkie says.
“They can evolve and change as their needs change. That’s one of the benefits we’ve had to supporting our network for 43 years now, we’ve been able to react to the needs of our business.”
Macaulay says it’s that philosophy that drove Morgans into its transition into a holistic wealth offering.
“Our advisers, in many ways, lead us – we listen to them in terms of what their needs are and the direction they’re taking,” Macaulay says.
“What we saw 10 years ago was some of our branches saying we want to go down this path [holistic advice], this is what we need. It was a push rather than a pull from the network that led us down that path.”
The group has over 1000 staff, including around 500 authorised representatives, in 57 locations across Australia and has over 200 shareholders who are all part of the business.
“Through our history we’ve had various partnerships and associations with different groups but at this point in time we’re 100 per cent owned by staff,” Macaulay says.
“Like everyone through the [Hayne] royal commission process we saw advice numbers dip. We probably held up a lot better than a lot of the industry did.”
Direct share investing is still a big part of the Morgans DNA and the group has a research team with 30 inhouse analysts.
Macaulay says having this sort of research capability is a big advantage for the advisers in the network, but the firm is also mindful it needs to be able to back other product vehicles.
“Instead of just plugging clients into managed accounts or ETFs or funds, there is [the opportunity for clients] and a lot of clients want to own direct stocks , they don’t necessarily want to be bumped into a managed account,” Macaulay says.
“We’ve just launched a managed account product and that was driven by advisers saying to us for a certain portion of our clients, they want to have Morgan’s model portfolios in a managed account format, and we’ve just launched that as an option.”
Macaulay expects some advisers may choose that managed account option, but Morgans avoids dictating how the advisers approach their choice of investment vehicle.
“We let them play to their strengths,” Macaulay says.
“Some of them, if they come from a financial planning background may not be comfortable owning direct stocks, so they need that fund research which we have, the managed account options… we don’t dictate which platform they have to use, we give them choice around that.”
Wilkie describes this approach as being “agnostic”. “We’ll do all sorts of advice, it’s driven off adviser needs,” he says.
