The advice industry is down 132 advisers this week dominated by the effective closure of 47 small self-licensed Australian financial service licensees (AFSLs), according to Wealth Data.
This compared to a net loss of 31 advisers in the previous week.
Wealth Data’s Colin Williams said it appeared the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) had been catching up with licensees that had not been removing advisers due to them failing the financial adviser exam.
“With regards to the FASEA exam, the AFSL was required to remove advisers who had not passed the exam and not eligible to have another go through to September,” he said.
“It is obvious that this was not done by many small AFSLs and it is only now being chased down by ASIC.”
It was a slow week for growth with only 15 licensee owners managing to grow in size for a total of 24 advisers. On a positive note, seven of these were provisional advisers.
Three licensee owners each had a net growth of three, including Michael Ibbotson (Security National Financial Services) with two advisers coming from Count.
In losses, 47 licensee closed accounting for some 64 advisers, few of which had switched elsewhere.
State One Holdings was down -10 leaving one adviser at the licensee. This firm provided mostly ‘general advice’ for stockbroking. Interfinancial Corporate Finance closed for the loss of four advisers with Picture Wealth also down (-4).
Marsh Mercer fell to zero advisers after losing three. A total of 22 licensees were down two including Capstone, Industry Super, with this week’s data showing a very long tail of 90 licensee owners down one.
Four losses were backdated to last year, taking the losses for 2021 to -3,453 or -16.23%, the highest percentage loss since the Financial Advisers Register (FAR) was introduced in 2015.
Year to date, 121 licensees had closed and 231 had closed for the current financial year.
