AMP launches dealer back-office support

AMP has added to the number of groups offering back-office solutions to financial planners with the launch of a dealer group back-office support service.

The back-office service, formed when AMP combined the various back office support units of its two dealer groups — AMP Financial Planning and Hillross Financial — into one division, was formally launched to AMP’s internal network of financial planners last September.

But AMP is now also making the service available to dealer groups and financial planners outside the AMP network that are looking to outsource part or all of their back-office functions.

The move puts AMP in direct competition with MLC with its ThreeSixty service, Zurich, which launched its Dealer Back Office Service (DBOS) in June 2000, and ING, which released ING Adviser Solutions in 2001.

The new AMP division, called Dealer Group Services, will provide financial planning groups access to technical support, paraplanning, compliance, training, financial planning software and investment research.

The head of AMP’s Dealer Group Services division, Victor Sumsky, formerly with the ANZ Bank’s wealth management division, says the new group is also likely to add practice management and marketing support modules to its service in the future.

However, Sumsky says AMP will not make the service available to all outside dealer groups, choosing instead to limit the service only to those groups that present strategic opportunities for the wider AMP group.

“I don’t think we are in a position to try and make money from back-office services. We see it as something to support our distribution business. We would seek to offer it only if it enhanced our distribution capability,” Sumsky says.