BT streamlines team roles

BT Funds Management has restructured its 60 strong national sales team, in a ma-jor refocus of its adviser services operations.

BT Funds Management has restructured its 60 strong national sales team, in a ma-jor refocus of its adviser services operations.

The restructure involves the abolition of the adviser service manager (ASM) roles to be replaced by two separate roles: adviser development managers (ADM) and dealer group managers. Both roles will continue to support BT’s business development man-agers but will have more focussed roles.

The ADMs will offer support to the business development team but will also service those advisers not serviced by the BDMs. The ADMs are responsible for making calls to advisers to open lines of communication and help build relationships between BT and individual advisers.

BT executive vice president Chris Freeman says many of the changes are designed to respond to the huge increase in funds inflow to the group this year. In the three months to the June alone, BT doubled its inflows for the year to March.

“With the inclusion of more than 1000 new advisers over the past year, and with business becoming so complex, we have to analyse and think about the needs of the advisers,” Freeman says.

“What we have planned is for the BDMs to team up with our ADMs, in an effort to help increase the number of advisers being serviced. Before the change, ASMs were seen as glorified personal assistants with mainly administration duties. In our minds the old ASM role is dead.”

The DGMs are responsible for the interaction and information exchanges with other dealer groups. They look after dealer groups including Count, RetireInvest and AMP.

Freeman stepped into the national business development manager role earlier this year following the departure of Steve Newnham to Zurich. He says the restructure has been crucial in the development of the group and its relationship with the 12,500 advisers who have a relationship with BT. Maria Zappia has been promoted to state manager for NSW following Freeman’s promotion.

The group is also looking to step up the level of service offered to master trusts. Tony Gobbo is taking up the role of national master trust manager in line with the renewed emphasis. Gobbo was previously Victorian state manager, a position taken up by Bernadette Spiteri who will also take on the dual role as second in charge to Freeman as deputy national business development manager.

Spiteri was formerly the Queensland state manager, the role now filled by former South Australia manager Angus McLeod. McLeod has returned to his former stomping ground to be replaced by busijness development manager Tim Rogers.

As well as providing assistance to its advisers through its adviser development managers, BT also hopes to increase its penetration of the corporate superannua-tion market. High profile BT executive Melinda Howes has been promoted to cor-poratre super adviser sales national manager in line with this expectation.

BT’s head of retail, Rob Coombe, believes corporate super is the group’s growth powerhouse.

“We believe that the corporate super master trust is the fastest organically grown master trust in Australia,” he says.

“Corporate super is a growth area for us. We are looking to increase BT’s market share from two per cent to around six per cent within four years.”

The group’s corporate master trust has $700 million under management and is ex-pected to reach the billion dollar mark by the end of this year.

Overall Australia’s corporate super master trust figures currently total more than $32 billion and is projected to reach $120 billion by 2008, according to research by Rice Kachor.

The restructure of the sales team at BT has not only witnessed a series of musical chairs at BT’s state offices, the group has also enticed a number of high profile busi-ness development executives to the team from elsewhere in the industry.

Luke Rathborne has joined the group from Rothschilds; while HSBC institutional stockbroker Andrew Hall has also come on board. Derani Street joins from Perpertual while Greg Newman joins the group’s Queensland office from Colonial First State.

Jamie Dunham has been transferred from BT to a position in Seattle with the Principal Financial Group which acquired the Australian business about a year ago.

Ben Harrop has been promoted to national adviser development manager from his role as account manager. Sheridan Taylor and Sue O'Brien have been promoted to the newly created Dealer Group Manager positions