Macquarie rules out acquiring dealer groups

Macquarie’s financial planning boss Robyn FitzRoy has ruled out acquiring finan-cial planning dealer groups to bolster its adviser numbers.

Macquarie’s financial planning boss Robyn FitzRoy has ruled out acquiring finan-cial planning dealer groups to bolster its adviser numbers.

Instead she says the group will “grow organically” by actively recruiting advisers.

“We’re not going to go down the Mercantile Mutual path,” she says.

Macquarie Financial Services (MFS) currently counts 20 planners among its ranks and FitzRoy says out of its four distribution channels — broking, direct, electronic and financial planning — financial planning is “in particular what we’re excited about”.

MFS was born of Macquarie’s private client broking division, FitzRoy’s managed investment direct business, broking groups Nevitts, Porter Weston and Day Cutten and BT Investment Bank. The group is hoping to centralise its paraplanners in the near future to maintain a quality assurance on all plans written.

She claims searching for planners is not Macquarie’s biggest challenge.

“We’ve found no problem with people knocking on our doors,” she says.

Advisers are “pretty brand loyal to Macquarie”, she says, maintaining that the group will “become successful by owning the customer gateway, not in product flogging”. MFS has about $2.2 billion in funds under advice.