The number of advisers fell by 319 this week as licensees continued to backdate losses to 2021, but there are positives on the horizon with an upward trend of provisional advisers, according to the weekly analysis from Wealth Data.
The total number of advisers came down this week to 17,282, which was close to the Wealth Data’s January’s forecast for January assuming the fall to 17,227.
“For those who look at the dashboards, you may be puzzled to see the large loss this week of (-319) yet the calendar year to date is only showing a net loss of (-85). This is due to licensees backdating losses to 2021,” Wealth Data’s director, Colin Williams, said.
“For our week-on-week update, we take a snapshot of the current week and compare to the same snapshot of last week, to avoid issues with backdating. Licensees do have 30 days to report adviser movements.”
On the positive note, he said, despite the large and expected drop, there was also a continued upward trend of provisional advisers.
Williams also noted that the CBA advisers who were forced to leave last year were being recruited elsewhere, with 178 being ‘let go’ after November last year and 102 having secured new roles, at AIA and other licensees.
On a separate note, William predicted that the accounting – limited advice business model would “continue to bleed” as the year progresses.
“The known Financial Adviser and Standards Ethics Authority (FASEA) exam pass marks indicate that they are still much lower than the other peer groups. They may make up a large part of the number of advisers who have failed twice but allowed to practice through to September,” Williams said.
“However, we suspect many will walk away from advice and we also suspect that a large number of the very small licensees will simply close.
“But the demise of the limited Australian Financial Services Licenses (AFSL) for accountants may well be an opportunity for holistic advisers to reacquaint themselves with accountants.”
Following this, the losses this week were dominated by SMSF Advisers Network which was down (-255) and down a massive (-380) for the financial year.
At the same time, looking at the year-to-date losses, owners of SMSF Advisers Network was not showing a great loss as their adviser losses were almost all back dated into 2021. However, when looking at the data from 1 Jan , 2021 to today the losses show Insignia at (-586) and NTAA at (-544).
Source: Wealth Data
