Licensees, which have shown the heaviest losses in adviser numbers year to date, are still dominated by the large institutions, with five licensees accounting jointly for net losses of more than 800 advisers.
According to the data compiled by HFS Consulting’s Colin Williams, since the start of the year NAB, AMP Financial Planning, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, Commonwealth Financial Planning and Charter Financial Planning were the top five groups with the highest net change in adviser roles.
At the same time, the top five groups with the highest growth in adviser numbers jointly gained close to 250 new advisers.
These included a few mid-tier groups such as Lifespan Financial Planning, Interprac and Sentry Advice, among others.
The study showed that year to date, GWM had grown the most in terms of adviser numbers, however the growth was attributable to a switch of more than 150 advisers from NAB.
“Without the switch, GWM would have negative growth of -74. Lifespan with 55 net advisers is still performing well followed by Interprac with 47 and Sentry with 35,” Williams explained.
As far as week-on-week analysis was concerned, the data confirmed the largest loss this week, of 28 advisers, was attributable to Vincents Financial Advisory, a division of accounting and business advisory business Vincents which was due to the firm’s restructuring which saw authorisations removed from many staff who were predominately accountants but no physical roles were lost.
“I think we will see more of this as trying to be both a financial adviser and accountant will become more problematic and costly as the Financial Adviser Standards and Ethics Authority (FASEA) pushes ahead. The costs and risks for trying to do both roles will not be a viable option,” Williams said.
At the same time, two firms this week formally left large licensees to start their own Australian Financial Services (AFS) licences and these were: Boyce Financial, which previously operated under Lonsdale’s licence, and previous Canaccord’s corporate authorised representatives RMBlack. The firms had 11 and 10 advisers, respectively.
