Planners to link up with Government for low end advice

Financialplanners could soon be linking up with government agencies to provide financial advice to low income clients, according to Liberal Senator Ian Campbell.

Campbell, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer, says the “next giant leap” facing Australia’s financial planners is service delivery to low-income clients.

“I think you’re going to find that financial planners will get involved in assisting people on much lower incomes,” he said in a recent interview withFinancialPlanningmagazine.

Campbell says that there are a lot of people out there who, because of the complexity of dealing with government agencies, are in desperate need of financial advice.

“What I’d like to see is Centrelink and those sorts of agencies working with financial planners, who’ll be able to go and help low-income people take more responsibility for their own financial affairs and integrate those sort of services with their longer-term financial and career planning.

“That will be the next giant leap in service delivery, where you start linking with people in much lower socio-economic groups. Even if this means they can just put away a bit of money every week, understand investments and take a bit of control of their life.”

Campbell said such moves would radically transform the financial planning industry.

“Financial planning, as a discipline, will bring together all the threads of where people get their income from, how much of the income they put away, what sort of investments they go into,” he said. “Ultimately, financial planners will become more and more important.”