Club Plus Super comes around to planners

Club Plus Super’s in-house financial planning service might have been in operation for just a little over three months but chief executive Paul Cahill (pictured) said that time has shown him the good financial planning can do.

“For 20 years I’ve been one of the greatest financial planning bashers the world’s ever seen but until I had my own business I didn’t realise the good it did,” he said.

In an industry funds environment, many members might not see the need for holistic financial planning advice until they get close to retirement, but once they get to that stage they don’t want to be spoken to in a group environment, in front of their mates or receive generic advice, he said.

“They want to be dealt with individually in a closed room, so they can go through it all systematically, and that’s what we offer,” he said.

From a fund perspective, Cahill quoted the example of a member who was contacted and offered financial planning advice on their $100,000 balance. Once the member actually sat down with a planner they ended up rolling over $300,000 from another fund, and their partner and parents also decided to roll over their super balances into the fund as well.

“So we’ve had instances where we talk to a member with $100,000 and end up with $1 million [in the fund], just from working through it, not by design, just because we now have that access,” Cahill said.

Rolling new members into the fund has been facilitated by the fund’s move to go public offer in October last year, but this move is not something the fund has been actively promoting. Cahill said the fund intends to promote it heavily in the future but for now is focusing on the financial planning service.

“Public offer opens it up enormously, but so far we’ve been focusing on getting the systems and processes right,” he said.

Club Plus is also in the final stages of setting up an in-house dedicated call centre, after which Club Plus will own all the channels of communication into the fund, so members who call up for either intra-fund or holistic advice can be directed to the correct part of the fund.

It means all departments are directly controlled by the trustee. Rather than being outsourced, the fund controls every communication point, meaning there are several channels of communication that can potentially help direct members towards the financial planning service, Cahill said.

Intra-fund advice within the fund is covered by membership costs and provided under the Club Plus Super Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL). Full financial planning is charged on a fee-for-service basis and provided under a separate Club Plus Financial Planning AFSL.