The decision on whether to include SMSF services in accounting and advice practices is now front and centre as many businesses are looking at how to bring in specialisation.
“What has become blatantly obvious to me is that we now need to give greater consideration to our SMSF strategy because we are seeing more businesses look to have a level of specialisation in this area,” The SMSF Academy managing director Aaron Dunn told the Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand SMSF Day in Sydney last week.
“How many of you here run a specialist SMSF business or have a specialist division within their business?”
According to the “2014 Future of SMSFs Report” from The SMSF Academy, 45 per cent of respondents still serviced SMSFs within a general practice.
“But [specialisation] is growing,” Dunn said.
“As you get more and more SMSFs in your practice, more and more are thinking about whether there’s a need to build a level of specialisation and that may come in even more so when you think about whether you move into licensing as well.
“We’re seeing influences of technology and influences of specialisation, this changing dynamic [of trustees] and regulatory reform, and all these things are starting to influence the way in which you do and can ultimately deliver services to your trustees.”
He said practices needed to think about the way they could look at the existing model, but identify where they would like to be in the future in order to pinpoint the gaps.
“[This includes] teams being able to invest time, effort and financial resources to getting the efficiencies of technology and looking at the issues of licensing and putting in structured approaches to deliver growth,” he said.
“It’s time to identify what that gap is in the way in which you deliver services today, understanding what you are currently doing, what those needs of your ideal client are and trying to fill that void.
“This is all front and centre because we’re asking ourselves: ‘What is the relationship going to look like with our SMSF trustees if we are going to ingrain licensing and advice into this process?’
“Is this going to be an addition fee? Are we going to try to bundle up recurring revenue around this client? What’s the service we’re actually going to provide?”
The “2014 Future of SMSFs Report” was based on a survey of 430 practitioners and aimed at uncovering how SMSF services were provided to trustees.
