Speaking with InvestorDaily, Mr Lane said he had expected some members to be suspicious of a Commonwealth Bank executive taking charge of the group following its acquisition by the bank in 2011, with potential concerns over their independence. But the addition of 18 new firms since his December 2011 appointment, with another 11 in progress, show the group is on the right track, he said.
“They were concerned about making sure they had a sense of independence and an . open approved product list (APL), and over that period of time I’m sure we’ve convinced them that’s the case,” he said. “The intention all along was to run Count as a separate business with a specific focus on accountants with a specific brand and an open architecture APL.”
Mr Lane yesterday announced further sweeping changes to the group’s offering to adviser and accountant members, following 2012 announcements of 20 basis point reduction in the group’s existing platform arrangements with BT and Custom Solutions Star platform.
This included the addition of IOOF’s pursuit platform to the APL, replacing Skandia IPS, which Mr Lane said would be coming in at a “better price point”.
Mr Lane also flagged the group’s intention to offer the limited accountants’ licence to members. “I think it’s fundamentally misunderstood by a large segment of the market. It strikes me as a huge opportunity for us,” he said.
“Last year when I asked members at the conference if they were interested in getting an accountants’ licence – this is people who are not [authorised representatives] – 200 people raised their hands.
“If you think about it, there are five to 10 thousand accounting firms out there who all over a period of the next three years are going to need to get a licence . There’s going to be a large opportunity there.”
Mr Lane announced every member now had full access to paraplanning via an in-house service, giving members more time to spend with clients and less time spent on statements of advice (SOA).
A new commission system will be offered through IRESS’s XPLAN CommPay, which will provide a fee disclosure statement solution for members that will be fully automated from 1 July.
But more importantly for members, according to Mr Lane, it will allow them to “slice and dice” their client information in any way they want.
“They really have been calling out to understand their businesses better. So if they want to know on a client-by-client basis or across their book where their revenues are being created and generated, what percentage is coming from insurance, what percentage is coming from investments, they can do that with this,” he said.
The group will be providing a listed securities solution for members that Mr Lane said should be particularly welcomed by self-managed super fund focused members. “Those clients often require listed securities off platform and this will give an ability to provide them with that in their listed tools, so they’re very excited about that,” Mr Lane said.
The solution offers a full APL of direct securities, hybrids, exchange traded funds, and is available on or off platform, delivered via individual portfolios, model portfolios or on an outsourced basis. “We’re going to do a pilot right after the conference and we’re rolling it out in August,” Mr Lane said.
The group has made significant changes to its strategic asset allocation and model portfolios in response to ongoing volatility since the global financial crisis (GFC).
Working with Mercer, Count has put together a new set of strategic asset allocations using the same subsets and groupings, but using alternatives to dampen volatility while still maintaining the same level of expected returns.
“We believe we’ve been able to do that; the model tells us that we can and we’re going to roll that out in September,” Mr Lane said.
Count is also overhauling its statements of advice, working with XPLAN to bring them down from 100 pages to 40 pages, he said.
“I suspect we’re not alone in the industry with this: our members were frustrated with our statements of advice. I think it’s just if you follow the history of this sector, as more and more regulations came in, each of the dealer groups put more and more compliance on top of what used to be a pretty client friendly document,” he said.
“It became harder and harder to read and eventually you wind up with 100-page documents, which I’m sure from a compliance perspective were very strong but weren’t particularly helpful to clients.
“It is something that these member’s firms we’ve been working with are telling us – they are convinced their clients will pick these documents up in the middle of the year and use them as reference points, which is a spectacular outcome. We’re going to roll that out on July 1, concurrent with FOFA.”
