People's Choice Credit Union will develop a self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF) offering and enhance its current superannuation product range in an effort to expand its financial planning offering after posting a strong result for the past financial year.
People's Choice managing director Peter Evers said that while the group offered a number of products via its partnership with BT it had yet to bring an SMSF product to market for its members and would rework its existing superannuation product range.
These products would be offered via the white label platform used by the 30 financial planners employed by People's Choice, which is supplied by BT after the two signed a partnership agreement in May of this year.
Evers said credit union does not publicly disclose the contribution of the advice division to the group $25.5 million underlying net profit after tax but stated that it currently held $1.5 billion in funds under advice. He stated this had increased over the past 12 months due to share market growth but also due to a 37 per cent increase in financial planning sales over the same period.
He said the group would continue its strong focus on risk insurance which accounts for 10-20 per cent of inflows and would continue to promote financial planning advice to its mortgage clients. However he said the recent level of negative publicity surrounding the advice activities of large banks had created doubt surrounding the value of advice.
"The issue is people's attitude to advice is not great and industry headlines trips up advice even further. They create doubt in the value of fee for service advice while our aim is to build trust in advice, not shareholder value," Evers said.
