Macquarie rules out acquiring dealer groups
Macquarie’s financial planning boss Robyn FitzRoy has ruled out acquiring finan-cial planning dealer groups to bolster its adviser numbers.
Macquarie’s financial planning boss Robyn FitzRoy has ruled out acquiring finan-cial planning dealer groups to bolster its adviser numbers.
Instead she says the group will “grow organically” by actively recruiting advisers.
“We’re not going to go down the Mercantile Mutual path,” she says.
Macquarie Financial Services (MFS) currently counts 20 planners among its ranks and FitzRoy says out of its four distribution channels — broking, direct, electronic and financial planning — financial planning is “in particular what we’re excited about”.
MFS was born of Macquarie’s private client broking division, FitzRoy’s managed investment direct business, broking groups Nevitts, Porter Weston and Day Cutten and BT Investment Bank. The group is hoping to centralise its paraplanners in the near future to maintain a quality assurance on all plans written.
She claims searching for planners is not Macquarie’s biggest challenge.
“We’ve found no problem with people knocking on our doors,” she says.
Advisers are “pretty brand loyal to Macquarie”, she says, maintaining that the group will “become successful by owning the customer gateway, not in product flogging”. MFS has about $2.2 billion in funds under advice.
Recommended for you
Financial Services Minister, Stephen Jones, has assured the cost and time to enter the financial advice profession will soon be halved, as shadow treasurer Angus Taylor pledges to reach 30,000 advisers.
The positive results of the latest financial adviser exam have helped the advice profession reach 15,600 yet again, according to Wealth Data analysis.
Financial advice firms have told Adviser Ratings they are planning to increase their compliance spend by almost a third, including on enhancements to their cyber security which ASIC has identified as an enforcement priority.
The digital advice platform is officially launching into the financial advice sector, offering up its services to practices as a means of engaging with the next generation of clients.
