Financial advisers should embrace estate planning in order to fully work in their clients' best interest, participants at yesterday's ifa estates and wills roundtable said.
Advisers needed to understand the end goal for their client in order to decide on the best strategy - essentially an inversion of the usual model, Australian Executor Trustees head of sales, trust and fiduciary services Shamal Dass said.
"You're not doing your client a service by asking them if they have a will and asking them to go and see their lawyer, that's not acceptable," Dass said.
If advisers gave advice to a client about shares and structures without understanding their will, they could end up providing negligent advice, he said.
"[For example] if you need $2 million when you die for something, then you need to know whether you're holding it in super," he said.
"[Advisers] need to know exactly what [their client] is trying to achieve before you starting tinkering."
Fiducian Financial Services senior financial adviser Alison Williamson said advisers needed to understand the value of estate planning, what it could do, the problems it could help avoid and the outcomes it could achieve for clients.
"The reality is, the client doesn't know what it is they need, the problems or where an estate can be attacked from a claim perspective. That's really the responsibility initially for the adviser to identify and direct the client to actually get that part of their affairs in order," Williamson said.
"In order to be complete and comprehensive in the sense of best interest to the client, you cannot avoid it, it has to be dealt with as an issue. Otherwise you cannot confidently say that you're dealing with the client's best interest."
PSK Financial Services general manager of advice Nigel Leverett agreed, saying all advisers should embrace estate planning.
"There is opportunity regardless of the age, demographic or wealth of the client to present to them and sell to them the benefits of why they should be doing it. I think from a planner's prospective that potentially opens the door to broadening the relationship with the family," Leverett said.
