Clearview Wealth is targeting acquisitions of financial planning practices in Western Australia and South Australia and expects to make the first additions in the first half of calendar year 2011.
Clearview Wealth was called MMC Contrarian prior to the takeover of Bupa's life insurance and wealth management business for $ 204 million in June this year.
"If you look at us today, we are in NSW and Queensland, and slightly in Victoria and Tasmania," Clearview managing director Simon Swanson said.
"Bupa and credit unions operate in South Australia and WA, so we will need to recruit," he said.
Clearview reported yesterday a net profit of $8 million over the 12 months to 30 June 2010, helped by various one-off gains.
The company has about $1.6 billion in funds under management and $1.5 billion under advice.
Swanson said the company's priority is a clean break with Bupa and the integration of its referral management system.
"The first thing is that we extract ourselves from the infrastructure environment of Bupa, and we are well on target to do that," he said.
"When we have completed that we will roll out our referral management system to all the Bupa sales offices and as we expand that we will then put on planners to match that need," he said.
Clearview has developed a module to add to financial planning software X-plan, which automates referrals.
"We've only got 25 practices [using the system] at present, however, we will roll it out to the rest of our adviser source before Christmas and then we will have 55 people on it," Swanson said.
"If you are a planner the most important thing is leads and we do have those, and we have the technology to assist that process," he said.
The company has about 55 planners across its dealer group Comcorp and Clearview advice businesses.
It has distribution alliances with Bupa, giving it access to 2.9 million members, and with credit unions, adding another 800,000 members to its network.
The company expects to roll out new products early next year.
The two non-consecutive alphabetic letters encountered most often last week caused more controversy than the underlying policy they represented, Wouter Klijn writes.... read more »
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