Neville Ward takes advice

While at least one Big Five accounting firm moves out of financial planning, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu plans to grow its operations significantly.Discount broker Neville Ward Direct is in discussions with several well-known financial planning groups with a view to providing a financial planning service for broking clients.

While at least one Big Five accounting firm moves out of financial planning, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu plans to grow its operations significantly.

According to financial services national partner Steven McCartney, Deloitte is look-ing to double its financial planning business to $1.2 billion under advice within two years.

It is also on a major recruitment drive and recently hired five new senior financial planners in its Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane offices.

They are George Krithis, previously with Potter Warburg, Malcolm Jackman, previ-ously with William Noall, Steve Romic, ex ANZ private client group, Simon Stokes, formerly with Pembrokes and Tony Creagh, previously with Godfrey Weston.

As reported in Money Management, a number of key staff recently departed Deloitte to set up the financial planning outfit Financial Aspirations.

Despite the senior departures, Deloitte says it will continue to build the financial planning business.

“We intend to grow the (financial planning) business faster than we have grown it in the past,” Michael Kean, the partner in charge of Deloitte Growth Solutions.

“We will be looking for new customers, but my suspicion is that most of our growth will come from the Deloitte customer base. There is a tremendous demand from cus-tomers that needs to be addressed,” he says.

Deloitte’s client base is largely generated internally as the firm works for many of Australia’s top 200 companies and claims to dominate the middle market.

As part of its heightened thrust into financial planning, Deloitte will install wrap ac-count technology and new research software.

Discount broker Neville Ward Direct is in discussions with several well-known financial planning groups with a view to providing a financial planning service for broking clients.

Managing director Chris Lavers says the move signals a shift in the strategic direction of the organisation which started 11 years ago as a pure discount broker.

Lavers would not disclose which financial planning groups he has approached, but expects a decision will be made on a joint venture arrangement in the next few weeks.

“There will possibly be two or three options available to our clients, one of which would be for limited advice where a client would pay a flat fee for yearly access to a planner, but nothing is set in concrete yet,” Lavers says.

The move is in response to a recent survey conducted of its 41,000-strong customer base which showed high demand for financial planning advice.

“We found our clients, mostly from the A-B socio-economic group — senior executives and the like — with an average of $470,000 invested across all the sectors, were hungry for additional objective information when making investment decisions,” he says.

A third of Neville Ward Direct’s clients sought financial planning advice, though many clients said they did not need full financial planning advice.

This is similar to the situation emerging in the discount broking in the huge US market where the giant Scwabb group has moved to offering financial advice to its predominantly Internet-based clients.

Neville Ward Direct offers clients access to more than 6,000 managed funds in Australia from over 200 fund managers. More than $600 million in client funds have been invested through the group since its inception by clients across the country via mail, fax or e-mail.

Ends