Bendigo Wealth intends to expand its scaled-advice offerings in a bid to satisfy investor demand for low-cost financial advice and avoid limiting itself to a traditional advice model.
“Clearly there is a lot of focus, not just with advisers and FOFA (Future of Financial Advice), but the value for money around advice,” Bendigo Wealth head of wealth markets Alexandra Tullio said.
“The trend that we’re seeing is that a lot of people want and need advice, but they simply don’t want to pay [the] couple of thousands of dollars for that advice document, which is more [the] traditional model.”
The decision to explore limited or scaled-advice options stemmed from demand by the company’s bank customers for Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s low-cost super offering, SmartStart Super, Tullio said.
As part of its expansion plans, Bendigo Wealth has teamed with Provisio Technologies.
“We use Xplan for our traditional planning process, but we felt that couldn’t get us the speed of producing an advice document where you’re on the phone with your customer and they want a solution pretty immediately,” Tullio said.
“The ability to have advice conversations on the phone with a wealth consultant is relatively new for us. We established that team in October last year and we have five wealth consultants on the phones at the moment and we’ll certainly look to grow that fairly rapidly.”
She said the arrangement with Provisio was not necessarily about developing a scaled-advice product, but more about “having those advice conversations”.
“I think [having a scaled-advice component] is critical. There’s no doubt that from what we’ve seen, not just from a Bendigo perspective, there’s pressure on margins and I think there’s a real demand for value-for-money solutions from consumers,” she said.
“I think if you just have a traditional advice model, then you’re really limiting your ability to get to your customers when they want to speak to you.”
