Former Storm clients reluctant to accept more financial advice
Former Storm Financial clients seem reluctant to accept more financial advice, with only a handful taking up the services offered by Financial Index Australia, the financial planning dealer group that bought the Storm Financial Planning book of clients almost two months ago.
Following the collapse of Storm Financial, FIA Agencies (FIA) — a wholly owned subsidiary of Financial Index Australia — gained the right to service the remaining clients of Storm.
FIA sent letters to around 10,000 of Storm’s clients specifying how it could assist them going forward of which it received between 400 and 600 responses refusing its services, despite about 150 clients understood to have had a product that needed servicing, according to FIA chief executive Spiro Paule.
Paule said FIA had been phoning clients consistently over a number of weeks.
“There’s a lot of anger and frustration in the client base,” Paule said.
While some clients felt they were poorly serviced, many of them didn’t even know they were Storm clients, according to Paule.
“They’d had no service whatsoever, they all thought they were clients of MLC, so the letter they got from us was kind of a surprise to them.
“There were a lot of people who had been ignored, weren’t appropriate for gearing, didn’t want to do it, or [Storm’s people simply felt] were too small to … consider [doing] anything with.”
A team from FIA was in Townsville last week running seminars and continuing to make contact with clients.
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