THIS IS the man on whom so much of the ANZ Bank’s joint venture with ING depends.
When ANZ finalised its joint venture with ING earlier this month, it effectively made a decision to outsource its responsibility over funds management.
But the measure of ANZ’s success with the joint venture starts and stops with ANZ itself, and perhaps with Elmer Funke Kupper, the man responsible for the bank’s retail distribution.
ANZ has set itself an ambitious three-year plan to triple the flow of retail funds coming from its own distribution channels, including its bank-based planners, as a result of the joint venture.
Is the plan too ambitious? Not according to Kupper.
Kupper has already pledged to double the ANZ’s financial planning sales force to more than 600 by 2005 in an effort to meet the bank’s targets.
The move would almost put one financial planner in each of the ANZ’s 740 branches, but even that could be just the beginning.
“I’d like to have more than 1,000 planners and there is no real constraint on our planner numbers, but we thought we would put a target in place for now that would support the increase in flows that we are targeting,” Kupper says.
The increased emphasis on planner numbers by ANZ is recognition of the bank’s fundamental failure to this point to achieve satisfactory distribution of its wealth management products to its own customer base.
According to Kupper, when compared to other banking products, the ANZ wealth management products captures only one-quarter of the total amount of money possible from the bank’s existing customer base.
Double that figure through the greater presence of financial planners in bank branches, Kupper says, and ANZ is well on its way to meeting the retail inflow targets it has set itself as a gauge to the success of its joint venture with ING.
“This joint venture is all about the cross-selling of products and that will work best by having financial planners in the branches,” Kupper says.
“By doubling our adviser numbers and increasing the referrals of our existing customers towards our investment products, we will reach our targets.”
