Mercer makes holistic planning push

Thefinancial planning arm ofMercer HR Consulting—Mercer Financial Planning— is executing a new business strategy to enable it to offer a full suite of financial services to the market through both internal channels and external alliances.

Traditionally, the group, which will be re-branded Mercer Wealth Solutions, has focused on offering events-based financial planning to some of the 400,000 corporate superannuation fund members it has access to courtesy of the broader group’s huge weighting in this part of the market.

“In the past we’ve focused on more events-driven financial planning such as resignation, retrenchment and retirement, however, our strategy now is to significantly broaden the range of advice we offer,” Mercer Wealth Solutions national manager planner teams John D’Alessandri says.

Part of the new strategy will see the group providing clients with a spectrum of financial services, through both its own advisers and external outsourced partnerships. D’Alessandri traveled to Melbourne last week to meet with potential partners as the group seeks to strike alliances in the areas of life insurance, mortgages and professional services, which includes taxation, legal and estate planning services.

Internally, Mercer has 43 authorised representatives but is in the process of increasing this number as part of its strategic review.

“We’re looking to boost our numbers and are slowly bringing more planners on board,” D’Alessandri says.

The group is sourcing the majority of its advisers internally, as a number of its 33 paraplanners and administration staff are intent on becoming financial planners.

“After a few years of working in admin they are looking for career progression, which isn’t too difficult given many of them are tertiary qualified anyway,” D’Alessandri says.