Prime Financial Group will press on with its plan to expand its wealth and advisory business following the launch of its new managed portfolio service.
The Prime Managed Portfolio Service allows clients to hold a portfolio of investments managed within a separately managed account.
“It diversifies our offering, it’s still keeping consistent with our direct investment philosophy and transparency of that, but this offering caters to a different style of client,” Prime Financial Group managing director and chief executive Simon Madder told InvestorDaily.
Prime’s current direct offering requires the client to be actively involved in each one of the decisions that has been made.
Under the new offering, the client would still have transparency about what they hold, but they did not have to be involved in every decision, Madder said.
“It is much more scalable, so it means we can still personalise the advice for clients, but a lot of the reporting is taken away because the administrator does that, [so] we can service a higher number of clients,” he said.
“We have had really good feedback. You can see the trend for advisers to get more involved in this space, but they probably don’t feel they have the expertise, so we see we can fill a bit of a void there not only for our own clients but for other advisory firms’ clients as well.”
He said the business was expanding at three levels.
“The progress we have made there has been very good, we have had active discussions with a lot of accounting firms … and there is a real opportunity for a business partner like us that comes from an accounting background to really deliver that piece,” he said.
He said that on the accounting side of the business, some of the firms Prime had invested in were in discussion about expanding their business or looking for merger opportunities.
In Prime’s self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF) administration and advice space, there are also active discussions to facilitate consolidation.
“In the past month, we are making really good progress, I am really pleased. [These] three channels are our priority, [we are] making sure we consolidate what we have in those three channels,” Madder said.
“Our first challenge is to recruit another 10 accounting firms in the wealth management front and on the accounting front we would ideally like to see a couple of our firms merge and scale up. On SMSF, we’d like to get that platform consolidated in the near term.
“There is plenty of opportunity, which is encouraging.”
