The government’s Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) reforms are the number one priority for RI Advice ahead of company growth and reviewing portfolio construction.
“Our key focus is to get ready for the regulatory changes. To get all the advisers absolutely geared and ready to go forward,” RI Advice chief executive Paul Campbell told InvestorDaily.
“That’s about trying to help the existing practices get on board and get their businesses growing, and our key focus is to get them giving great advice and then being successful from that. And also attracting practices who are like-minded in the thinking.”
RI Advice’s approach had been to build a business model that was future ready and FOFA compliant, rather than to only focus on FOFA, he said.
“[We decided to] not just rejig our model to cope with FOFA; to me that is a band-aid solution,” he said.
“We’re very much about ‘what do we need to do to create confidence and have this become a professional organisation’ and we have to do all those things. If you do it right, you should just tick off the FOFA issues [anyway].
“We see this new legislation as a great opportunity to actually be a catalyst for change. So we are very progressive in that. I think the big thing is being able to remove the disclosure.”
RI Advice is also focusing on business growth and is busy recruiting practices and advisers.
“Like anything, that takes time, but we’ve got a very strong pipeline at the moment. We’re not recruiting in the 100s or anything like that, but a very good pipeline,” Campbell said.
“Growth is really important to us … we have been meeting a lot of recruitment prospects that we are successful with.”
The group is also planning to do more work on reviewing the way portfolio construction happens in response to changing market fundamentals.
“People are looking for more than just a balanced fund with a bunch of fund managers constructing into their asset allocation. There needs to be a bit more going round that going forward, Campbell said.
