News

Financial Planning

A year of practice development opportunities

practice development

Financial advisers will experience some respite from regulatory change in 2022 that will allow them to focus on improving practice profitability.

The Financial Planning Association of Australia (FPA) has predicted the coming year heralds an opportunity for advisers to escape regulatory change and strengthen their business models and practices.

“There is a 12 to 18-month period where they can really start to focus on their advice businesses. So they can really start to focus on their clients and they can think about how to make their advice business more efficient, a lot more cost-effective, a lot more engaging and therefore a lot more profitable for them,” FPA head of policy, strategy and innovation Ben Marshan said at a media briefing today.

Marshan explained this window of opportunity has come about due to a combination of factors, such as the impending federal election and current status of the Quality of Advice Review and the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) review into financial services.

“When you’ve got an election [coming], you’ve effectively got nearly a six-month period where there is no regulatory change,” he said.

“Additionally, because we’ve got these two reviews going on which aren’t going to make recommendations until the end of the year in terms of the Quality of Advice review and then the ALRC [report] still two years away, there won’t be the regulatory reform that comes out of those [processes] this year either.”

FPA chief executive Sarah Abood observed this forecast optimistic outlook for advisers in 2022 is already materialising among the advice industry.

“So many members I’m speaking to right now have never been so busy, but they’re busy with client work and that’s encouraging me,” Abood said.

“What great planners love to do is engage with clients and help clients solve problems and help clients be better off and almost everyone is saying they’re absolutely run off their feet by demand, and I think that is a fantastic sign and I think that is likely to continue.”

To this end, Marshan confirmed one of the FPA’s key focal points in the coming year is what it can do to help its members understand how to strengthen their advice businesses.

Copyright © SMS Magazine 2024

ABN 43 564 725 109

Benchmark Media

Site design Red Cloud Digital