Renumerator gets into planning
Salary packaging company Remunerator Financial Services is expanding into fi-nancial planning.
Salary packaging company Remunerator Financial Services is expanding into fi-nancial planning.
General manager Vic West says the company plans to go national and to hire 10 planners by the end of the financial year — and possibly more after that.
He says the thrust into financial planning has been spurred on by increased interest from employers.
“We also see it as a business opportunity. We believe that financial planning is a growth market and that it will get even bigger as move into areas like freedom of choice,” he says.
Remunerator, which currently has two planners in Melbourne and one each in Perth and Adelaide, is looking to offer a full financial services package to employ-ers, of which financial planning will be one part.
The company has already applied for both a life brokers and a dealers licence.
West notes that financial planning is a natural extension of Remunerators’ busi-ness. “It seems to me that salary packaging is the first step in a financial plan,” he says.
Meanwhile, RPC director of corporate services and development Alex Paine says financial planners who ignore the huge growth in salary packaging could find themselves left out in the cold.
“There is an enormous shift to salary packaging which most advisers are not aware of. Unless they understand the mechanisms in the market place, they will suffer.”
Paine says most employers will ask their employees to seek external advice before they take their salary packaging benefits. And, the advisers that they will seek will be those accredited by their employers.
Paine says the adviser will give that employee consistent advice on how to struc-ture their remuneration and there is fair chance that the employee will continue to use that adviser when he or she retires.
“The financial planners whose clients they were before this may find that their business is under threat,” he says.
According to Paine, the growth in salary packaging is being led by the demand in the government sector, although major employers and employee groups, as well as the trade union movement, are swinging behind the concept.
AUTHOR
Zilla Efrat
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