ipac south australia has added the $70 million practice XPAL to its stable, with former practice director Keith Brenner citing a desire to get back in front of clients rather than dealing with more red tape created by Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) changes as a key reason for the move.
XPAL started as an accounting practice in the mid-1990s and added financial planning in 1999. It has now added three advisers, one staff member and 400 private clients to ipac south australia. A fourth adviser chose to move on rather than stay with the business, Brenner said.
"We were looking at succession planning, which was something we at least needed to start planning for sooner rather than later," he said.
"We started to have a look and realised the business was more saleable than we thought, so we made a decision to sell the financial planning business."
Brenner said the directors of the business were keen to continue looking after their clients.
However they were finding that with industry changes, including regulatory reform, it was getting more difficult to spend the amount of time they wanted with their clients, as well as making sure they ticked all the boxes from a compliance, administration and staffing point of view.
"So we decided we would sell to ipac and just be faithful to our clients and spend a lot more time doing what we wanted to do, rather than working out how FOFA is going to impact us. Our clients deserved that as well," he said.
The directors were happy to have a larger licensee such as ipac to monitor the compliance side of things, enabling the advisers to spend the bulk of their time back in front of clients. There had been a noticeable improvement in the first six weeks following the sale, he said.
ipac south australia now has $1.3 billion in funds under advice, and a staff of 54 with 26 advisers.
