The FPA’s decision to directly address the findings of ASIC’s retirement advice shadow shopping survey with members of the advice industry is part of a move to impress on practitioners the need to improve the level of advice in the country.
As part of the association’s move, the FPA will work with representatives of ASIC and the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) and hold education meetings across Australia to discuss the findings of the corporate regulator’s research.
“We work very closely with ASIC and FOS and we saw an opportunity to ensure that this was in fact an educative process, and that we were able to uncover the requirements around the ASIC criteria to discuss and workshop them and to learn from this exercise rather than it being a lost opportunity, in a negative context,” FPA chief executive Mark Rantall told InvestorDaily.
“We are looking to take advantage of the opportunity here to work with the key regulator and obviously the ombudsman service together with ourselves to help advisers understand what the shadow shop was all about and how we can learn from it.”
Rantall said neither he nor any other FPA representative had seen the full results of the survey.
“The findings have not been released as yet and we’re not privy of the findings,” he said.
Through its nationwide meetings, the FPA was attempting to “get ahead of the curve” and schedule meetings that addressed the survey’s findings, he said.
“The entire industry should be working together to improve advice and to make sure consumers get better outcomes,” he said.
“That’s what we’re really all here to do. The heart of the matter is we all want financial planning to be a respected profession because we know that on balance it provides a service which is of national interest to the community.
“[It is a service that] is not only desperately needed today, but is desperately needed in the future.”
Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) chief executive Richard Klipin said the AFA would also hold meetings with ASIC and its members in July.
In January, ASIC commissioner Peter Kell released interim details of the survey as part of a public hearing of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services inquiry into the government’s advice reforms.
The regulator is expected to release the findings of its retirement advice survey later this month.
