Inquiry questions thousand-client practices
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The Parliamentary Joint Committee (PJC) on Corporations and Financial Services has questioned the representatives of dealer groups on how many clients a practice should be limited to if they were to fulfil their obligations to every client.
At public hearings on the PJC Inquiry in Melbourne, the committee questioned the representatives of Guardian Financial Planning on whether a planning practice could claim to have 1,000 clients, such as Storm Financial, and still fulfil its client duties.
Steve Browning, Guardian Financial executive manager, said he didn’t think it was possible to prescribe the number of clients a practice could have.
“[It] depends on the definition of a client, it depends on how many clients you can viably service and support, but [it] also [depends] on the structure and sophistication of the practice,” he said.
However, Browning said many advisers simply have a large database full of people they might claim to be clients but aren’t really serviced or supported in any serious way.
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