Ansett boon for financial advisers

A select group of RetireInvest and Winchcombe Carson financial advisers are set to become the unlikely beneficiaries from the much publicised collapse of Ansett after unions approved them to give advice to the airlines staff.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has begun registering an increasing number of requests for financial advice since the Ansett collapse and is referring the airline’s staff to its Financial Advisers Network, a group of carefully selected union accredited advisers.

The list of ACTU accredited financial advisers includes 18 dealer groups and 120 individual planners but is dominated by RetireInvest and Winchcombe Carson advisers who each have approximately 40 advisers approved to provide advice.

Chifley Financial Services, Gow Gates and Garrisons are the next most common names on the ACTU list, each with five accredited planners.

The growing requests for financial advice come just as the first of up to 11,000 of Ansett’s 17,000 employees are expected to receive letters from the airline’s administrators offering them voluntary redundancy packages.

The offers of voluntary redundancy follow the Government’s announcement that it would release up to $195 million by mid November to help fund redundancies, after initially indicating the funds would not be made available until the administrators had exhausted all other Ansett assets.

Both Winchcombe Carson and RetireInvest indicated last week they had not yet experienced a noticeable flow of Ansett employees into their adviser networks. However the situation could be reversed as Ansett workers begin to assess their options following the offer of redundancy.

The letter offering the redundancy package is believed to include a note stressing the importance of financial advice, and pointing Ansett workers towards the ACTU’s network of advisers.

RetireInvest’s corporate business development manager Vicky Ampoulos says it remains to be seen whether Ansett employees will create substantial new business opportunities for the group, but confirmed RetireInvest had benefited from being part of the ACTU network in previous cases of mass redundancies.

A spokesperson for Winchcombe Carson also acknowledged the group was prepared for an influx of inquiries from Ansett employees, but stressed the first role of its advisers would be to recommend whether Ansett staff should actually accept a redundancy rather than what they should do with any package.