What advice are most advisers giving?
The two largest areas advisers are eligible to offer product advice for are superannuation and managed investments, according to Wealth Data.
Wealth Data found out of the 18,966 advisers on the corporate regulator’s Financial Adviser Register (FAR), 17,057 and 15,785 advisers were eligible to offer super product advice and managed investment advice, respectively.
At the same time, advisers offering advice in margin lending was the smallest group among the specialist advisers as under 9,000 were eligible.
Wealth Data director, Colin Williams, said while the current Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) FAR showed a total of 18,966 advisers, his research excluded timeshare and FX advisers, which brought the number of advisers down to 18,762.
He said there was little doubt that there were a number of advisers on the FAR that “should probably not be classed as financial advisers”.
“Advice, like many professions can become specialised and it would make sense for some practices to have a focussed team of specialists as opposed to the entire team being generalists,” he said.
“When we mix the offers, the numbers reduce. For example, only 7,115 advisers can offer risk, super, investor directed portfolios (IDPs), securities (shares) and margin lending.”
The chart below highlights the number of advisers and how many can offer certain types of advice as defined on the ASIC FAR.
Source: Wealth Data
This week, most growth in adviser numbers was achieved off the back of licensees taking advisers away from IOOF.
Following this, 28 licensee owners saw net gains for 36 advisers and 20 licensee owners had net losses for (-40) advisers.
Additionally, 29 individual licensees had net gains of 40 and 29 individual licensees had net losses of (-47).
Year-to-date losses continued to be dominated by the larger groups, with the largest losses in percentage terms happening across the accounting – limited advice segment (mostly self-managed super fund advisers) of the market.
Also, no new licensees opened for this sector, while over 100 commenced for financial planning peer group and 14 for accounting – financial planning (accounting groups that provided holistic advice).
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