Premium planners desert Count
A group of Count advisers including some of its biggest hitters have left the group, striking out on their own as a new accountant based financial planning group.
A group of Count advisers including some of its biggest hitters have left the group, striking out on their own as a new accountant based financial planning group.
Ten Count Wealth Accountant practices have signed up with the Premium Ac-counting Group, including three out of Count’s top 10 practices.
Spokesperson for the breakaway group, Lewis Waters from Peter Walker Partners, says each of the firms are long established accounting practices with at least $20 million in funds under advice.
The new group will have about 30 advisers and $500 million in funds under ad-vice. Waters says the group will build its membership with the aim of having 50 firms on board within 15 months. Firms trading under the Premium banner at launch later this month include Gordon Hrnjak & Rae, Sims Crawford Elliott and Herkess & Partners.
"We have had several calls from Melbourne, Brisbane and regional New South Wales and have meetings in July to examine the way any further groups will come on board," Waters says.
However high profile recruit to the new group, Simon Wu, says competing with Count in the future is not part of the plan.
"Our aim is to not go out and openly compete against Count. Each member firm values their time under the Count banner and views the evolution to Premium as a natural progression," Wu says.
Count managing director Barry Lambert says he wishes the new group well but emphasises the loss of the firms was not serious.
"We have put on a number of new firms in the last month and will do again next month. Business will go on as normal and we should not see any real blips on the radar," Lambert says.
Premium has partnered with InvestorWeb for research, brokerage and technical support for a Website while compliance has been outsourced to the Accent Group. The group will use Macquarie for its wrap account in conjunction with Vision software, now owned by InvestorWeb.
According to Water discussions are underway into the provision of brokerage fa-cilities for advisers and clients, for access to local and overseas equities.
AUTHOR
Jason Spits
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