PKF moves to consolidate

Chartered accounting firm PKF is in the final stages of uniting its financial planning operation under the Australian Financial Services Licence held by its Sydney office.

The firm’s Adelaide, Gold Coast and Brisbane financial advisory offices have already been absorbed under the Sydney licence, with Perth expected to follow suit shortly.

PKF managing director, financial services, Peter Richards said the firm decided on this course of action to streamline its operations as well as to reduce its costs.

“The costs of actually maintaining and running a licence are quite high. You have regulatory requirements and compliance requirements that you’ve got to keep up-to-date with, you’ve got to have a full financial audit every year, you’ve got to produce compliance manuals and so forth,” he said.

“It didn’t make sense to keep maintaining four licences, which is pretty much what we had, because it becomes very expensive after a while,” Richards added.

He stipulated though that the new direction was not intended as a growth strategy for PKF.

“I look at it sometimes as more of a cooperative where we’re sharing costs and gaining economies of scale by being on the one licence. It’s very doubtful we’d then go out and start trying to attract advisers to our firm,” Richards said.

The move has fitted in well as part of the rest of the firm’s national approach to business operations.

“PKF as a firm for the last five or six years has adopted a much more national view instead of having separate accounting partnerships in Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney. It’s led to much more consistent procedures across Australia, and we’ve adopted the same attitude with financial planning,” Richards said.

The Perth office is expected to be operating under the Sydney licence this month and will bring the total number of authorised representatives covered by this licence to nine.