Still plenty of life in the industry

The life office dealer groups — most notably AMP, AXA, Suncorp Metway, Zurich, ING, Royal & Sun Alliance, NAB/MLC — make up 4,533 advisers or around 32 per cent of the industry — a figure that has remained reasonably steady since last year’s survey.

Look Research’s Leo Wassercug says that while Financial Services Reform (FSR) legislation will cause a decline in the number of traditional life advisers operating in the industry, there will not be a decline in the number of dealer groups hailing from a life industry background.

“Just as the old-style life offices have transformed themselves into fund managers, the dealers with a life background have become fully-fledged financial planning practices,” he says.

Under the new single licensing regulatory system, a life adviser must become a registered agent or broker by obtaining their own licence or become an authorised representative of a single dealer group that becomes their licensee.

Hundreds of advisers nationwide have been forced to quit the industry after failing to comply with the new compulsory education requirements of FSR, including a number of advisers from life-based dealer groups AMP, NAB/MLC, and ING.

However, Wassercug says there was evidence in last year’s survey that many life-based dealer groups had already begun working on their models and incorporating life agents in preparation for the changes in the FSR legislation.

“AXA and Zurich, for example, created Altus Financial Planning and Financial Lifestyle Solutions respectively in the past 18 months focusing on life advisers because they recognised that because of FSR, they needed to bring their life advisers up to scratch.”

Altus entered the Top 100 for the first time last year, debuting at number 69 with 26 planners. This year, with more than double the number of advisers (59), Altus has raced up to position 47.

AXA has two other groups — AXA Financial Planning, which held onto its number five position and Charter Financial Planning, which moved up to position eight (from nine last year).

Lynx Financial Services and Financial Services Partners (FSP) were also working last year on models that would help their advisers meet the PS 146 requirements of FSR legislation, but the intervening 12 months saw ING’s Lynx merge with two other ING dealer groups — Partnership Planning and AustAdvisers to form Tandem.

It’s too soon to tell how the combined group will fare, but the data relating to each of the groups before the merger shows that Lynx moved up a couple of notches to position 23 this year, keeping exactly the same number of advisers (170) as last year.

AustAdvisers did not rank last year, but was sitting at position 80 with 25 advisers this year, while Partnership Planning (which hails from an accounting background — see page 21) moved down from position 33 with 104 advisers to position 39 with 86 advisers.

Zurich’s Financial Lifestyle Solutions debuted this year at position 51 with 53 advisers. Another Zurich-affiliated dealer, Australian Financial Services (AFS), came into being in March 1997 as a co-operative of advisers. The group maintained both the same number of advisers (103) and the same position (34).

But probably the most interesting of the life-based groups is Royal and Sun Alliance’s new dealer group, Guardian. Guardian debuted at position 35 this year, pulling in 98 advisers from a standing start.