Fastest growing dealer groups: St George banks on diversity in advice

Providing the level of advice to suit the client’s needs using different groups of advisers allows St George Bank advisers to cover more of the bank’s customer base.

St George provides planning services via a split sales force — branch-based advisers with more limited capabilities mostly delivering basicAdvance Funds Managementsolutions to customers, with another group of more experienced financial planners to deliverAsgard, Advance and other external products to clients who require more comprehensive financial planning.

Head of advice Paul Cullen says that while this model is efficient for some of the bank’s customers, changing regulatory and competence requirements will probably see St George moving towards a flatter adviser structure and changing its growth strategy.

“We’ve got smaller customers who have got relatively simple needs and don’t need comprehensive financial planning, so we need to balance their needs with the cost of providing advice, and having that level of adviser is a way of doing that,” Cullen says.

“But with the Financial Services Reform coming up, the difference between what it takes someone to be qualified to a minimum level and fully qualified is narrowing, so we will probably merge those two so that everybody will be able to deliver all types of advice.”

St George previously recruited and trained completely new staff as advisers, but has moved towards bringing in more experienced people, although Cullen says the group will continue to give entry-level opportunities through the reintroduction of cadetships.

“With the regulatory changes, it’s much more difficult to take things from scratch, and you’ve also got the gestation period from the time they start until they’re productive,” Cullen says.

“The stresses and strains on the business are quite large if you’re trying to grow aggressively that way, so we are trying to balance it out a bit more.”

The group’s growth has resulted from an increased focus on providing wealth management solutions to customers, with a greater commitment to resources and increasing the number of leads coming out of the branches.

Planners from the St George-ownedSecuritorgroup are now also being utilised to service branches where it is not economically viable to have a salaried planner.

“It’s quite exciting, because we can both service the customer base in those areas and also support those planners,” Cullen says.