ING-owned dealer group RetireInvest will rebrand to RI Advice Group from 1 January next year.
The RetireInvest brand will be maintained as a sub-brand within the group, and about half of its existing practices will continue to use only this brand.
"RetireInvest is a 30-year old business with a great history, good reputation and a good strong name, but it probably hasn't done a lot in the last five to seven years in terms of leveraging that opportunity," RetireInvest chief executive Paul Campbell said.
"I started in February and the brief was to get some structural growth happening within RetireInvest."
To achieve growth, Campbell wants to move the group away from solely providing retirement investment services to offering a broader range of services including insurance, self-managed super funds and estate planning advice.
"When people think about growth they think: 'oh, you just want to recruit'. It is not about that entirely. Recruiting new practices is very intensive and very costly," Campbell said.
"We very much want to see our existing proprietors achieve significant growth. We want to double or triple the size of our proprietors over the next three to five years."
But according to documents obtained by InvestorDaily, the dealer group is aggressively recruiting planners and recently made offers to advisers of AXA-owned dealer group Genesys Wealth Advisers.
The rebranding exercise also lifts the group's current postcode restrictions, as practices that will trade under the new name can expand in existing RetireInvest territories.
Although Campbell admitted this would create additional competition for its advisers, he said in practice most advisers rely on referrals for new business. This makes it unlikely that advisers from the same group would run into each other, he said.
"If you look at all the other dealer groups out there, this is nothing new," Campbell said.
RetireInvest currently has about $9 billion in funds under management and more than 200 advisers.
