Revealed: how Australia's wealthiest value and measure advice
May 20, 2010
The inaugural Investment Trends / Centric Wealth High Net Worth Investor Report offers compelling insights into the attitudes of Australia’s wealthiest individuals toward financial advice.
The report, extracts of which were formally released at an event in Sydney today, comes at a time when the future shape of the industry in general, and advice in particular, remains the subject of intense scrutiny and speculation ahead of the 2012 Future or Financial Advice (FFA) reforms.
Some of its key findings span critical issues such as:
- respondents’ main sources of financial advice
- whether they would like more or less advice and in what areas
- key qualities they expect in an adviser and in the advice itself
- how – and how much – they would prefer to pay for advice.
Centric Wealth’s CEO, John McMurdo, who presented the advice-related aspects of the report, said that its findings presented a clear vision of the way ahead for the wealth management industry and highlight the need for it to hasten its steps toward gaining recognition as a true profession.
“There is a clear preference among these educated investors for receiving quality advice from expert advisers who are independent professionals, and not institutionally aligned. Clients have a clear and fundamental expectation of integrity, impartiality and that their needs will come first,” said McMurdo, who has welcomed the Government’s proposed FFA changes and, in particular, the elevation of the adviser client relationship to fiduciary status.
However, he said, the industry at large still faces issues when it comes to standards and professionalism.
“Although we endorse the Government’s moves, at Centric Wealth we still believe that both current industry best practice and the wider standards proposed for compliance by 2012 still set only a minimum standard.
“For financial advice to gain the credibility of a true profession, further steps are needed and the findings of this report bear out this view. We are strongly committed to this cause, having already taken many of those steps in our own firm in terms of adviser qualifications and experience, fee structure and provision of an integrated offering that is appropriate to the reality of the diverse needs of clients.
“We plan to keep raising the bar and feel that, in the broader industry, others need to move with us. We are pointing to this report as yet another objective indicator of where our industry needs to be heading.”