More than 20 AMP Financial Planning (AMPFP) salaried advisers have accepted redundancy packages following the announcement last month the dealer group would be closing its employed adviser support channel.
22 of the 32 advisers affected by the move have now accepted a package offered by the dealer firm, which has seen its salaried adviser numbers fall from more than 200 in 1998 to just over 30 in 2004.
According to AMPFP managing director Greg Kirk, of the 10 planners that remain – six have moved to self-employment within the network, three are pending decisions on self-employment and one has joined an existing practice.
“In many ways the staff taking the redundancy offer have benefited given the stages of their careers that they were at.
“They tended to be older advisers and those that had been with the organisation for some time, so the financial element of the redundancy suited them. Their risk profiles were such that they didn’t want to go to self employment at this stage of their careers and for many it may be a case of early retirement,” Kirk says.
According to Kirk the number of employed planners within the dealer group has shrunk in recent years as more have opted to take the self-employed route, leading the group to cease servicing its relative small number of in-house advisers due to the costs involved.
AMPFP is also in the process of hiring a number of new staff, which include business coaches, advice specialists, recruitment and succession specialists, sales and marketing personnel along with systems and processes professionals.
“We will have completed our transformation in terms of people restructures by the end of this calendar year. Once finalized there would have been some 250 people that have been impacted by the exercise between July and December. All in all we’re raising the bar for both our planners and our staff,” Kirk says.
