Financial Wisdom beefs up its support services

Paul Barrett

The Commonwealth Bank-owned dealer group Financial Wisdom has enhanced the support function for its authorised representatives as part of the new remuneration model it implemented in October.

A new initiative called Financial Wisdom Premium has now been introduced in response to feedback from financial planners for a more sophisticated offering aimed at the needs of long established financial services practices.

The enhanced support facilities include intensive specialist business coaching, an extended approved product list, specialised acquisition and merger assistance, a leads program, and peer groups and advisory boards.

But while demand for the services has originated from established practices, access to them is not restricted to those types of operations.

“We have a number of criteria that we look at and being established will make it easier to meet those criteria,” Financial Wisdom general manager Paul Barrett said.

“There are about six or seven criteria we look at. For example, we look at the culture of the organisation, specifically, is there a culture of self improvement? …We look at how technology savvy they are. Are they embracing technology and trying to find ways of delivering better services to their clients more often using technology?”

Barrett cited an entity’s compliance culture as another qualification measure for Financial Wisdom Premium, in particular the personnel and procedures underpinning it.

And although the new Premium offering is not available to all practitioners in the dealer group, Barrett feels the organisation as a whole will benefit from the service.

“The standard offering has also been enhanced by Premium. For example, when you build a leads program the leads are offered to our premium practices first. But often they can’t service the volume of leads, or it might be a location issue, so of course those leads will flow through to the rest of our planners,” he said.

In regard to the remuneration structure, the dealer group has implemented changes to remove conflicts of interest by getting rid of preferential dealer splits, preferential business valuations and preferential remuneration arrangements.