After another intensive regulatory year, financial advisers may finally need to go back to their roots and focus on the providing advice, according to Lifespan Financial Planning.
The company’s chief executive, Eugene Ardino, said advisers would in particular have to help their clients manage the impact of market volatility on their portfolios.
Ardino said that assuming there would be no more regulatory changes and once the transition period during which many advisers would be moving to fixed term arrangements with their clients would be over, there would be some time for advisers to go back to advice, servicing clients, and finding solutions in the challenging environment.
“[One of the] big themes that is going to play out this year is going to be stock market volatility and normalising interest rates and the impact of that on client portfolios and how to minimise the fallout and make it as painless as possible for clients,” he said.
“I think a lot of people were expecting the share market to go a little bit higher last year. That obviously did not happened, so I think a lot of advisers now are start looking at the portfolio construction and try to make sure that they are positioning well for what could be a very turbulent year.”
Ardino stressed that the sheer volume of all the compliance changes in one go worked as an obstruction to the main thing the advisers should be spending their time on.
“Barring any more structural or procedural changes, this could be the year when we just sort of get on with it and go back to our main focus being our clients and advice,” he said.
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Who has time to actually consider investment markets or a client's financial situation anymore when it's full steam ahead getting them to sign umpteen forms re: what you've been paid & what you'll get paid or whether a product provider bought you a coffee in the last year?
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