Have you heard of FASEA? It’s the relatively new Financial Standards and Ethics Authority, established in April 2017, well before last year’s Banking Royal Commission, to set the education, training and ethical standards of licensed financial planners. It’s creating...
How do you identify the right financial adviser? It’s hard. Moreover, it is potentially getting harder. Last week the government’s chief economic adviser – the Productivity Commission – recommended the formation of an expert panel to select the ten best...
I hope Commissioner Hayne’s recommendations are going to help us all understand that the vast majority of today’s financial advice is not financial advice. Initial messages from his Royal Commission suggests he is focussed on how we’ve ended up with...
You know that milk ad where the guy walks into his corner store asks the lady for milk? She blandly spiels out the multiple varieties of different milk. Having asked a simple question, the guy gets confused now not knowing which one is right for him. He just wants...
Brad Cooper – chief executive of Australia’s BT Financial Group (a division of Westpac Bank) provided insightful observations in the Australian Financial Review last week regarding shifts in the UK financial advice market and potential implications for our market here...
What is a ‘rich’ conversation? From my observations of firms that do them well, rich conversations differ from the majority of conversations in a number of ways. And they can be hard in the beginning. All of a sudden asking new (and existing) clients questions like...