Call for standarised, regulated SOA document

A former senior Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) officer claims the financial services industry has been held to ransom by a lack of guidance and a regulated formatted Statement of Advice (SOA) document.

In a column to be published in Money Management, consultant Bruce Kennan has argued for a standardised or regulated SOA document across the entire financial services industry so that "advisers can better focus on the best interests and needs of their clients".

"For well over a decade this industry has been held to ransom by the lack of accurate guidance, or to be precise, a regulated formatted SOA document," he said.

Keenan claimed that, in the absence of such a document, the industry had been "hijacked by many including the media, lawyers and those in various ‘supervisory' roles".

"As a consequence, considerable and very valuable resources have been wasted on a wholesale scale at both industry and regulatory level trying to resolve the industry impasse," his column said.

Keenan said the other downside was that the key focus of the legislation had been totally lost in circumstances where the client was never intended to receive a lengthy and complex SOA document, where because of its complexity and length it became unreadable and not fully understandable by the client.

He said that critics who believed a formatted SOA document would only lead to diminishing the importance of the advisory role or that of the supervisors needed only look to the use of Government-regulated formatted documents throughout many sectors of all industries.