ANZ Financial Planning is aiming to boost its ranks by 50 planners a year over the next few years.
ANZ advice and distribution general manager Paul Barrett said the banking channel’s salaried financial planning numbers were relatively low at 270 compared with about 600 at Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) and about 500 each at National Australia Bank and Westpac.
“We need to look to grow that business,” Barrett told a strategy briefing.
“When you look at the bank-based financial planning businesses, ANZ is underweight in terms of the number of financial planners.”
He said the bank would hire about 50 full-time planners a year over the next few years.
“The strategy is to build that organically,” he said, adding the bank was shoring up its internal pathways to enable more people to progress to planning careers.
“The one competitive advantage we have is our 10,000-odd staff. We’ve got every demographic there. It’s actually a great place to start building our pipeline.”
He said ANZ would aim to recruit most of the new planners from within “in the medium term”, but would also recruit externally.
His numbers were deliberately conservative, he said, adding that if the internal recruitment processes were successful “we should be able to get those 50 from that [internal] initiative alone”.
ANZ and its associated divisions have about 1800 advisers in total, putting the bank third behind about 3000 at AMP/Axa and around 1850 at CBA if its $373 million offer for Count Financial goes ahead.
Barrett said advisers’ traditional career path, which eventually led to setting up one’s own shop, was no longer the dominant trend.
Over the past 12 to 18 months, a significant number of independent financial advisers (IFA) had joined banks and other large organisations, he said.
“More and more IFAs want the security of a big organisation and the [global financial crisis] has been the catalyst for that change. I’d call it a flight to safety,” he said.
