While 336 new financial planning licensee entities have been created over the past 12 months, 118 licensees have been discontinued affecting 2,000 advisers, two-thirds of whom have yet to find a new home or may have exited the industry.
That it is bottom line of the latest data issued by Adviser Ratings who said the 18 discontinued licensees represented a total of 2,172 advisers or around 10 per cent of the total advice community.
“Nearly two-thirds of these advisers are yet to be re-licensed,” it said. “Of the 2,172 advisers effected, 1,392 are still not advising, inviting speculation that many of these advisers have left the industry for good.”
The implications of the data were made clear by Adviser Ratings when it said that the median time for an adviser to be unlicensed prior to getting back in the industry was, normally, just 37 days and that only 36 per cent of affected advisers had thus far found new homes.
It said that of those advisers who had gone to new homes, the vast majority had gone to privately-owned licensees and that of these advisers, nearly nine out of 10 had joined privately-owned licensees who were not owned or affiliated with the traditional large financial institutions.
