Platform provider WealthO2 has revealed it has launched a facility that will improve its functionality and result in giving it the ability to help advisers retain their SMSF clients.
“[The facility] WealthO2 is working on [is aimed at] making it easier for whoever, in this case advisers, to move [a] client’s portfolio onto [our] platform because that is an impediment at the moment,” WealthO2 chair Neil Roderick said at a media briefing in Sydney today.
“[SuperSimplifier is represents] a whole new, improved, streamlined way of doing it.”
WealthO2 managing director Shannon Bernasconi identified the specific benefits the initiative will provide advisers with SMSF clients.
“There are groups of advisers that are associated with accounting firms that have been traditionally SMSF orientated and they have this conundrum [whether they will] lose their client when they get to an age where they don’t feel they want to be a trustee anymore,” Bernasconi said.
“Or do I keep my client by using something like Super Simplifier that [makes it] so easy to transfer [the client’s portfolio over to the WealthO2 platform].
“So it looks the same [as an SMSF] but it’s just in a different trustee structure and somebody else is doing the audit and somebody else is doing the accounting et cetera, and it’s [provided at a] lower cost.”
In addition, she noted the structure of the platform would also assist in driving the profitability of advisory practices as it has incorporated naked pricing in its design.
WealthO2 executive director Darren Pettiona noted: “The concept of naked pricing strips out fees exchanged between third parties in the value chain of advice and discloses only those fees payable by a client on a transparent basis, void of revenue bias or conflict.”
According to Bernasconi, this feature has already delivered significant results for advisers using the WealthO2 offering.
“One group brought across, in a year, $200 million [in funds under advice] and 300 clients to WealthO2 and that was 70 per cent of their book … In that calendar year they were able to increase their own revenue by 32 per cent,” she pointed out.
Previously, WealthO2 had advocated for platform providers to respect the relationship advisers have with their clients.
