It has been six years since Rob Pedersen and 31 other financial advisers formed their breakaway group, Matrix Planning Solutions.
And while Pedersen still comments on his exit from Prudential as though it were a great escape, he has no regrets — after all, it was the stimulus for the formation of Matrix.
Pedersen, a founding Matrix member and adviser, is direct in his comments about the Prudential sale to Colonial First State in 1998.
His decision to leave was based on feeling left in the dark and financially unrewarded for his work after the sale.
However, Pedersen does linger on one point that may have been the clincher in his mind — group loyalty.
“I suppose there was a group of guys who were very loyal to Prudential — and Prudential owned Financial Wisdom at that stage — and then one day we were all with Prudential and the next day, gone. And part of the sale was the Financial Wisdom dealer group for a substantial amount of money, and the advisers built that from nothing and we got nothing,” Pedersen says.
“We knew that we should do something, but one of the biggest problems setting up a dealer group is proper management and the group that got together to make a decision [realised] that we were not managers, we were advisers and salesmen and the only way for this to work was quality management.
“And then when we got Pieter Franzen (Matrix executive chairman) and Allison Dummett (Matrix managing director), we hit the jackpot,” he says.
And so in the six months after Prudential’s adviser exodus, Pedersen and a number of advisers made some calls and in January 1999, Matrix Financial Planning was formed.
The group’s dealer licence was approved in May of the same year.
“I think none of us realised how hard it was to get something going, but we wanted to do it properly and we were not interested in putting on lots of numbers of advisers,” Pedersen says.
“We always knew that as a group we wanted to be independent. But we also released that we couldn’t manage it.
“We needed professional people, and it was just pure luck that we got Pieter Franzen as our chairman,” he says.
Nowadays, Matrix houses more than 80 authorised representatives who run their own individual businesses providing financial planning and insurance advice to clients.
And while Pedersen says the group is not actively seeking to immediately grow its adviser numbers, Matrix advisers are encouraged to grow their own businesses by hiring new blood through graduate programs.
Collectively, Matrix advisers have in excess of $1 billion in client funds under advice.
And as for Matrix’s future plans, Pedersen is adamant the group will remain independent, claiming Matrix is not looking to align with larger groups, but create value within its dealer group.
“We’re certainly moving in a direction of more sophisticated products — offering more than just the managed funds.
“We see the market changing and so want to provide products outside of managed funds.
“And we want to be the best,” he adds.
