CBA to add 200 planners by end of 2004

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is aiming to increase its financial planner numbers by 200 over the next 18 months and reduce the number of products offered by the combined CBA/Colonial group, it announced at an analyst briefing today.

CBA group executive for Investments and Insurance Services (IIS), Stuart Grimshaw told those present that “looking forward we expect IIS to generate additional revenue through meeting the investment and insurance needs of more of our banking customers. We will be looking to increase planner numbers to do this.”

The announcement follows the bank’s revelation back in May that it was undergoing an “important cultural shift”, which it said would be more far reaching than the impact of the bank’s privatisation on the group.

Earlier this week CBA said it would retrench 600 employees and today added that its products would drop from 255 to 124 by 2005.

Besides the additional planners and streamlining of product offerings, the group will also look to remove outdated systems, with the aim of ultimately having five core systems across its businesses.

“As mentioned earlier, in 2002 we established a team focused on rationalising products and systems across IIS while retaining customers. This is particularly important in the current environment where more frequent regulatory changes create significant system upgrade costs,” Grimshaw says.

“We have scale and balance across third party financial adviser distribution relationships, our branch planners, and the advisers in our dealership groups, and we are continuing to build on these strengths.”

CBA’s third party adviser channel consists of 16,000 relationships, it also has 730 internal planners, and 430 dealer group associated planners.

Grimshaw says the bank’s Financial Planning and Advice Services division is “uniquely positioned, as the central distribution point into bank channels, to leverage knowledge of both customers’ investment and insurance needs, and specialist product knowledge to improve our distribution capabilities and increase sales penetration into the bank”.