Ipac looks to the future

A stronger push into the provision of advice to wealth accumulators is part of recently-appointed ipac chief executive Neil Swindells’ vision to grow the company and become a more dominant force nationally.

Swindells said he would like to see the group’s footprint grow from an estimated 25,000 customer relationships to around 100,000. This number of contact points includes some form of relationship with one of the approximately 200 advisers in the ipac Financial Planning and Tynan Mackenzie networks, or one of the equity partners associated with ipac, Swindells said.

While the group does have an equity partnership and acquisition model in place, Swindells said this would not be the only key to its future growth. Rather, Swindells would like to crack the challenge many in the industry are working on — the cost-effective provision of advice to clients in the wealth accumulation phase.

“We need to move into the accumulator market more,” Swindells said.

“I can’t tell you that we’ve got the answers to do it, but we’re now definitely investing time, money and intellect into that.”

Swindells said while the group has tended to target accumulators as well as those in the retiree bracket, it hasn’t been a fully-fledged strategy, partly because of the obstacle of doing so profitably on a large scale.

“One of the things I’m really interested in pursuing is how to move to a lower cost model that doesn’t devalue what we do,” Swindells said.

“I don’t want to become ipac and ‘ipac light’.”

The challenge is to “take care of people while they’re accumulating their wealth ... and then recognising when they need more”, Swindells said.