Former Securitor practice goes alone on Gen X and Y AFSL
Long-time Securitor-aligned financial planning practice, Experience Wealth, has set up a new Australian financial service licence (AFSL) aimed at specifically focusing on Gen Y and X clients.
Melbourne-based Experience Wealth announced this week it had launched a new AFSL, which will trade as ‘Black Sheep Advisers', with the objective of servicing Gen Y and X clients and drawing on support from netwealth-owned Pathway Licensee Services.
Experience Wealth chief executive, Steve Crawford, said that the group had realised about six months ago that to innovate in the market, it needed to break away from the traditional licensee model.
The company is partnering with netwealth subsidiary, Pathway Licensee Services, which will be assisting with skills, training, compliance and governance support.
Crawford acknowledged that it had been a big decision for the firm to have its own licence given the significant governance and compliance responsibilities — something which gave rise to the arrangement with Pathway.
"Working with Pathway to transition from being a large, institutionally-owned licensee business, to having our own licence has been surprisingly quick and relatively easy. We are already starting to see the benefit of their support and we can't wait to bring our fully refreshed and modernised offer to our target market in 2016," he said.
Pathway Head of Governance, Phil Anderson, said the company was seeing a lot of demand from advisers.
"The fear of compliance restrictions and increased responsibility has been holding people back," he said. "…the delay in the resolution of issues with ‘grandfathering' initially caused complications for financial advisers changing licensee, and also setting up their own licence. With those issues resolved, enabling advisers to set up their own licensee without losing ‘grandfathering', there is now an increasing awareness and demand for the benefits of greater control and increased flexibility to meet the needs of clients."
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