Little appetite for a new financial planning body
It would be extremely challenging to establish a new financial planning representative organisation with 70% of advisers who responded to a Money Management survey suggesting there is simply not room to do so alongside the Financial Planning Association (FPA) and the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA).
The survey, conducted in the wake of the FPA announcing a new strategy and the redundancy of around eight staff, found 94% support for a merger of the AFA and the FPA and very little support for the establishment of a new organisation.
Those survey respondents who believed the FPA and AFA should not merge, were then asked whether they believed there was room for the establishment of a new adviser representative organisation, with 70% responding ‘no’.
This was despite the fact that 83% of respondents to the survey said they believed that financial planners would be best represented by a single organisation.
Importantly, while 70% of respondents who were members of the FPA said they did not believe they were being well-served by the organisation, compared to 47% of members of the AFA this was significantly below the nearly 82% who expressed a similar sentiment with respect to other representative groups within the financial planning sphere.
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