Fund managers need to stop complaining about margin squeeze from BT Wrap Advantage and instead pass scale benefits back to the investors, Count Financial boss Barry Lambert said.
Speaking at Count’s annual conference in Perth yesterday and issuing a statement to the Australian Securities Exchange, Lambert said fund managers receiving massive scale from legislated superannuation should be passed on in reduced fees.
He said some managers need to give up their public campaign to discredit financial advisers and dealer groups that support BT Wrap Advantage as a better deal for investors.
Meanwhile Count is urging its financial planners to write more life insurance and is scouring the market for a specialist platform to help them.
Count is currently undertaking a pilot program of Macquarie Bank’s new life insurance wrap and is looking at another version from BT that will launch in September, Count chief executive Marianne Perkovic told planners at its annual conference in Perth yesterday.
If those wraps don’t work for Count as an industry solution because they only promote the fund manager’s own products, the group will use its in-house Wealth Planner platform as an e-wrap for life products, Perkovic said.
“[In the next] 12 months Count will review [its] life wrap providers,” she said.
Perkovic said the main objections from planners to writing life and risk products are platform inefficiencies, and pointed to a recent study that showed only 24 per cent of advised investors received insurance advice from their planner.
“That’s really devestating to see this factor,” she said.
Count is ramping up its training and services to help planners write new life business and will offer training for life specialists at professional development days this year.
The group is also accelerating growth in its new acquisition business, Countplus (CPL) and is encouraging its planners to seek out new partnerships.
It is currently in talks with 10 accounting and financial planning firms, which is the upper limit that the group has decided it will handle at any one time, Lambert said.
