The integration of Snowball and Shadforth Financial Group has so far not resulted in any major movement of staff, the company’s managing director has said.
“The main adviser retention strategy that we have that’s unique is that the owners of the business are largely the advisers, so we’re in the position where the vast majority of advisers and staff have material interest in the company,” Tony Fenning told InvestorDaily.
“In aggregate, they control the company so that’s obviously different to most groups where you’ve got an institutional owner.”
In addition, Fenning said bringing the two groups together required a considered approach through a series of “carrot on stick” provisions incentivising advisers to stay, but also keeping them from leaving if they were thinking otherwise.
“It’s the usual balance of those things so we have contractual protections that effectively require people to leave the client base alone and/or to take time out of the industry,” he said.
“On the flipside we have a REM scheme, which rewards merit and effectively allows them to continue to grow their earnings depending on their performance inside the business.
“So there’s sort of a three or four-tiered mixture of things that have helped us so far. Over the last six years on the Shadforth side, it has pretty much retained everybody.”
He also said Snowball planned to make its newly-combined portfolio construction and management capability, Mosaic Portfolio Advisers, available to third-party channels and independent advisers in the future.
“What we want to do is upgrade that to a stand-alone business so we’re building that as a competency going forward,” he said.
“We’ve also started doing a full platform review whilst FOFA’s (Future of Financial Advice) going on and telling us [what] the new rules are going to be in terms of the structuring and capital required.”
He said the evaluation would assess Asgard Wealth Solutions, BT Financial Group, Symmetry Portfolio Service supported by Colonial First State and its stockbroking back office, which is run through UBS and Praemium.
The extensive review is set to run into next year.
