Count Financial’s new management has fully leveraged the power of Commonwealth Bank ownership to offer its financial adviser members key improvements and incentives to remain within the dealer group, including platform discounts, open-architecture approved product lists, improved technology support and the same privileges and discounts afforded to bank employees.
The package was announced by Count’s new chief executive officer, David Lane, to its dealer group conference today and came in the wake of recent reports of some members of the dealer group having left to join other financial planning groups.
Speaking to Money Management ahead of the dealer group conference, Lane acknowledged the loss of some financial planners but said the management was determined to maintain Count as the accountant-driven business it had always been,
"We’ve lost a few advisers and each and every member is important to us – we hate to lose even one," he said. "At the same time, and in a funny way, I’d be disappointed if they weren’t attractive to other dealer groups. We have some of the best in the business."
At the core of Lane’s announcement to today’s dealer group conference was the addition of Colonial First State’s low-cost platform, First Choice Wholesale, which he said would provide savings of 20 basis points and sometimes higher.
As well, Lane pointed to the implementation of an additional 20 basis point reduction attaching to the first $1 million in the Star Portfolio.
However in answer to the suggestion that the use of First Choice Wholesale and other Commonwealth Bank vehicles had simply fulfilled the warnings of critics that Count would lose its identity, Lane insisted that this was more than offset by an open-architecture approved product list (APL) and a "product agnostic" approach.
Further, he said that Count would be seeking to negotiate a lowering in costs on other products on the APL.
Where financial planning technology was concerned, Lane said Count would be moving to be beef up support around XPlan Voyager, as well as beefing up technical services support by drawing on the substantial resources of the First Tech team.
He said that Count would also be moving to return to an in-sourced approach to paraplanning, introducing a pilot program to bring it back in-house.
Count would also be looking to provide licensing arrangements sufficient to handle the Government’s approach to the accountants’ exemption – something that would not only be offered to accountants within the Count network, but more broadly,
In dealing with the Future of Financial Advice changes, Lane said Count would be working hand in glove with its financial planners to make sure they were ready with respect to both client segmentation and client pricing, and utilising Voyager with respect to opt-in.
