Women still largely underrepresented among planners
About 79% of financial planners, who are registered under the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) Financial Adviser Register (FAR) and revealed their gender, are male, according to this week’s data from HFS Consulting.
However, this figure accounted for only close to 90% of the adviser cohort, as there was not sufficient information with regards to gender for the remaining 10% of planners registered on the FAR.
This comes on top of the week which saw another net loss of 45 adviser roles across the industry and a drop of the total number of advisers at AMP Financial Planning, the single biggest Australian financial planning group, to below 900.
At the same time data for the smallest end of the industry, which included typically licenses with one to two advisers, showed that year to date there were 142 licensees which have currently no advisers even though they started a year with either one of two advisers.
On the more positive note, there were 82 licensees in this smallest market segment that commenced operations during the year.
“Not so noticeable but worth investigating, was the fact that five licensees dropped to zero advisers for the week. Only one of the five had two roles, the remaining four all only had one role each,” HFS’ director, Colin Williams, said.
“We did see two new licensees commence with one adviser each, Peritia Wealth under adviser Darrin Newport, ex Crown Wealth and Lambert Group commenced with adviser Rowan Keast, ex VIAFGSA – Via Financial Advisers.”
By comparison, Money Management’s TOP Financial Planning Groups mid-year ranking found this year that over the last five years was the total number of the Australian financial services licenses (AFSL) holders went up to around 2,100 in 2020 (from 1,200 in 2015), with the percentage of groups that had between two and 10 active planners grow to 51% from 46% in 2018.
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