Centrepoint Alliance has grown revenue 13 per cent to $326 million over FY25 and seen significant growth in its managed accounts business, with funds under management (FUM) rising 40 per cent to $423 million, driven by distribution across six investment and super platforms.
“More and more advisers are looking for solutions that are available on other mainstream platforms – HUB or BT,” Centrepoint Alliance CEO John Shuttlesworth tells Professional Planner.
“As the licensee, we’ve always done paper portfolios that advisers could follow but they’d implement those themselves. We’ve transitioned those to SMAs [separately managed accounts], where Morningstar is the asset consultant and we’ve constructed some good, high quality, diversified managed account solutions across different risk profiles.”
Shuttleworth says Centrepoint is “absolutely open architecture” and that it’s up to advisers to choose where they direct client monies, but that if Centrepoint feels it has a compelling product it’s “certainly going to offer it”.
“If you look at what Diverger managed to achieve and what others are doing, the managed account area just continues to grow strongly,” Shuttleworth says, referring to the offering now run by Count.
“To be honest, I like the idea of our advisers being in portfolios that are professionally managed rather than doing their own portfolio construction, because there’s an element of risk management around professional investment managers; some advisers are good at it and some are less skilled at it.”
Centrepoint is also investing heavily into cybersecurity, an issue that has leapt to greater prominence following ASIC’s move to launch court action against Fortnum Private Wealth over allegations it failed to properly manage and mitigate cybersecurity risks – a charge that its parent company Entireti has indicated it will defend.
Shuttlesworth says that cybersecurity is an issue that businesses “have to be really tight on”.
“We mandate external cyber reviews for aligned advisers, using external vendors, and every two years they have to go through it,” Shuttleworth says.
“We have cyber standards that they need to adhere to, we use geolocation restrictions and have just gone through a project where we take all personally identifiable information and, anything beyond the mandatory date you have to keep it to, we’ve redacted or destroyed the data; we do penetration testing.”
Still, businesses will always have risks; “nothing is bulletproof”, Shuttleworth says, and all you can do is decrease the chance of a cybersecurity breach.
“When you look at the issue with ASIC and Fortnum, what the regulator is quite often looking at is, you might have a policy that says you’re doing things, but they look and say ‘Are you doing what you say in the policy? Are you doing regular testing and making sure you’re securing the data?’.
“There’s no doubt that, whether the regulator had a focus on it or not, the last thing you want to do is have somebody’s details hacked and have an exposure or loss as a result of lax cybersecurity standards.”
Centrepoint is also investing into AI in a move that it hopes will “transform advice delivery” as well as monitoring and compliance across its business.
“Where I think the big areas of AI will be are, we do audits of advisers through the professional standards team and get advice documents and reviews; that whole monitoring and supervision piece can be accelerated by AI,” Shuttlesworth says.
“We’ve also got obligations around management of our approved products list, and we can use AI to look at how the products are performing and identify any issues.
“There are some major parts of our business where we see efficiencies. If you’re an adviser, the Holy Grail will be when advisers can use AI agents to develop statements of advice and records of advice and accelerate that process to become more efficient.”
The group reported a net profit after tax of $5.1 million, off $326.1 million in gross revenue.
