While Lonsec has once again been labelled as financial planners’ favourite ratings house, this year’s Money Management Rate the Raters survey finds its popularity isn’t what it used to be with planners making room for new entrants and thus breaking the oligopoly.
Lonsec this year was highly regarded for its quality of its staff, model portfolio capabilities, good value for money, consulting services, and fund and fund company and asset allocation research.
Despite the research house being the top rated for six categories this year, it was a lesser result than last year. In 2018, Lonsec was the top-rated research house for eight categories.
This year, Morningstar overtook Lonsec’s lead in client services and website tool and services.
Lonsec’s gold spot in client services dropped to third place this year with only 42% of planners believing its service was ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ compared to 53% last year.
Morningstar was also the unquestionable winner in the corporate strength category with 80% of planners rating it as either ‘excellent’ or ‘good’. While Lonsec won this category last year, it slipped to third place with only 63% of planners rating it as higher than average.
The survey also found that the relatively younger research house, SQM Research, was making its mark by securing third place when it came to value for money, behind Lonsec and Zenith.
SQM beat out long-standing research house Morningstar with over 45% of surveyed financial planners rating its value for money as either ‘good’ or ‘excellent’.
