Around five to 10 per cent of the financial advice market will specialise in aged care advice over the next five or more years, with assistance from a network of professions including placement agencies, and estate planning lawyers.
Such was the opinion of Aged Care Steps co-founder, Louise Biti, who told a media briefing yesterday that an additional 20 to 30 per cent would need to be equipped with sufficient knowledge and support to raise issues with clients.
“The rest of the market I think will be doing other areas of advice or have other interest groups or specialisations,” Biti said.
“What they need to do though is they still need to be raising the awareness with clients, and helping clients identify when there’s an issue arising and they will refer through to the 10 per cent that have become specialists.”
Biti also said aged care services were further removed from a financial product than other areas of advice as it involved third party operators.
“What it’s about then is about life decisions and choices that they’re going to need go to third party operators, aged care providers… and we can’t control or arrange that for clients because it’s up to those providers and their availability and whether that’s the person they choose to sell the service to,” she said.
This would require a certain amount of specialisation from advisers to understand the technical processes they needed to follow around aged care and the impacts of that on clients.
“In aged care you’re dealing with a whole range of product providers that have their own perception of whether they can sell to you or not and their understanding of rules, the departments and regulators as well,” Biti said.
