Lifespan Financial Planning has set its sights on expanding its advice network, planning to add 20 authorised representatives this year.
The dealer group intends to recruit around two financial advisers each month, Lifespan joint managing director John Ardino told InvestorDaily.
“One of the pleasing things we’ve actually had is many of our recent recruits are actually younger,” he said.
“We’ve got nothing against the older folks but demographics of our group have changed slightly over the last few years because younger accountants and financial planners have been joining us.
“It’s also good for the longevity of the group to see younger advisers in their 30s and 40s.”
The dealer group experienced a buoyant recruitment period during 2009, adding around 25 new authorised representatives to the Lifespan stable, Ardino said.
“We had a good year in terms of recruitment of accounting firms and non-accountant financial planners,” he said.
“We had quite a significant net rise whereas in the previous four or five years we’ve actually remained relatively stable, so we decided to reverse that and we’ve continued to reverse that.”
While Lifespan’s current network of 135 authorised representatives is predominantly accountancy based, Ardino said they are looking to expand the group’s financial planning division.
“Our major goal is to recruit accounting firms because that’s our niche target market, but more and more we are attracting non-accountants,” he said.
“We attract those planners as well because they know they’re able to network with a lot of accounting firms and perhaps join forces and make alliances with some of these people and that works reasonably well.
“We’re also finding more and more accountants actually want to specialise to become dedicated financial planners as well.”
