Speaking to InvestorDaily, former AFS Group chief executive Peter Daly said Beacon has entered into an arrangement with mortgage aggregator Connective – 25 per cent of which was acquired by Macquarie Bank this week, as reported by InvestorDaily’s sister publication The Adviser.
“Where a practice has capacity, we will take a practice from being full financial planning and then open them up into other areas,” said Mr Daly.
Connective differs from other aggregators in that it doesn’t “tie you down”, said Mr Daly. If the financial planner ends their relationship with Connective, they don’t have to leave their clients behind, he said.
Beacon has also developed its own “sub five per cent” mortgage product, which is designed to compete with the big four banks, said Mr Daly.
Along with mortgage broking, the dealer group is also building a ‘hub and spoke’ accounting service for its planners as part of an effort to encourage cross selling across Beacon practices, said Mr Daly.
“We will acquire two [accounting] practices to begin with,” he said.
These practices will form the ‘hubs’ that have all of the accounting expertise in-house, while the ‘spokes’ will go out to the various financial planning practices within the dealer group, said Mr Daly.
“I’m encouraging practices to go out and buy their own accounting firms … and then turn them around,” he said.
While the accounting practice will have a steady stream of revenue already, the “real benefit” will come when the accounting clients are transformed into financial planning clients, said Mr Daly.
Beacon will also unveil its approved product list (APL) tomorrow, which will consist of 340 products and 900 underlying products beneath that, he said.
“We have 13 preferred partners. But being a preferred partner doesn’t mean your product is on the APL, or vice versa,” he said.
Beacon will also offer the Personal Choice Management product, which is vertically integrated though the Association of Independently Owned Financial Planners (AIOFP), which is chaired by Mr Daly.
Beacon will also be announcing an ‘adviser protection fund’ in conjunction with the AIOFP, which is modelled on the similar Police Association fund.
“We’re going to charge the advisers a dollar a day. And then it’s going to be in a fund, and there will be a trustee appointed to that fund,” said Mr Daly.
While he said Beacon does have appropriate levels of professional indemnity insurance, there may be instances when the insurer refuses to defend the case, he said.
“Where an adviser is being attacked in the marketplace and we believe there is a genuine case to defend, we’ll come to that adviser’s defence,” said Mr Daly.
