Engaging inactive clients will be one of the biggest challenges facing financial advisers in the post-Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) world, according to executive general manager of advice and marketing at MLC Richard Nunn.
Nunn told Money Management MLC had been focusing heavily on helping advisers engage some of the clients they may not have spoken to more recently, particularly those interested in transactional advice, rather than holistic.
Technology and the online world are considered to be major drivers of client disengagement due to easy access to do-it-yourself wealth solutions such as self-managed super funds, online broking and direct insurance.
"Part of that has got to do with a large number of clients out there that don't have active advice relationships," Nunn said.
"They've got products with advisers and products with wealth managers – but not active relationships – so they've been confronted with a whole bunch of different ways that they can access product supplies," he added.
MLC had launched a program called MLC Engage to help its advisers tackle this issue.
Nunn's comments come as CoreData names one of its dealer groups – Apogee Financial Planning – the 2012 Advisory Group of the Year, in addition to highly commending AMP Financial Planning and another MLC-owned dealer group, Garvan Financial Planning.
CoreData also released its 2012 Financial Planning Shadow Shop, which highlighted an overall marginal decline in the ability of financial planners to acquire new customers.
Nunn said the finding is no surprise.
"Post GFC nobody has found it easy to find new clients and a lot of potential clients are seriously considering doing things themselves," he said.
"But a lot of advisers are realising that the value in their businesses resides in active clients and they're working those clients very hard – providing a great service to them and supporting them in what has been a pretty difficult market."
