Listed financial services group Centrepoint Alliance has continued on its strategy of improving its financial planners’ productivity with the announcement yesterday of four key appointments, spanning distribution strategy and marketing, life insurance, research and a regional manager for Queensland.
Centrepoint, the parent company of Professional Investment services (PIS) and Associated Advisory Practices (AAP), has appointed Neil Rogan, formerly AMP’s Stronger Super change stream leader, as the head of distribution strategy and marketing; David Spiteri (pictured, right) has rejoined the Centrepoint group as the national manager of life insurance after two years spent at BT as risk practice development manager for Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia; Theodore Hatsis will join Centrepoint as head of research from CBA, where he has been a senior research analyst; and Simon Backman has been appointed regional manager for Queensland and northern New South Wales for PIS, having been a practice consultant and acting regional manager.
Since his appointment last April, Centrepoint managing director John de Zwart has embarked on a program to streamline the efficiency of financial planning businesses in the PIS network by standardising the systems and investment solutions the practices use, and to focus on providing solutions to PIS and AAP advisers designed more to meet clients’ needs more closely.
“[David Spiteri] is there to reinvigorate our life insurance also across the network, but also to look at how do we make it easier for those people who do not want to become a life insurance specialist, how do we execute and support them in meeting their clients’ needs?” de Zwart says.
“That’s one of the real opportunities we see this year. Again, coming through the process, part of the standard system is, have you considered the insurance needs for you customer, yes or no? If no, then what are those needs? And then it starts to feed into another process that falls into David’s area that helps the adviser, if they do not want to get actively involved, to close that.”
Simplification and streamlining
De Zwart says key aspects of the simplification and streamlining strategy include the deployment of a standardised Xplan platform across the group, which should be finished by the end of the month, and introducing model portfolios to reduce the investment research and administrative burden on practices. De Zwart says Centrepoint aims to improve the efficiency of its practices by “between a third and 50 per cent”.
“In the past, PIS’s solution was – and the same with AAP – if you’re an adviser, one of the 550, do whatever you want,” de Zwart says.
“So we’d supply a different system, we’ll supply a different product. We had x number of wraps, x number of SOAs, 120 ways within PIS of paying people. You can’t run a business like that.
“When you look at an adviser’s practice, and to go between them, they all think they are very different but literally they are so, so similar. The only differences are that some people focus on certain things, whether that’s client communications, another one might focus heavily on investment research, whatever it may be. But there’s not a huge difference in terms of what they do on a day-to-day basis.”
