The Top 10 Most Influential People

Choosing the most influential people in the financial services industry is a task fraught with difficulty.

It goes without saying that there are possibly hundreds of people worthy of consideration — from advisers to fund managers to researchers to educators to regulators.

Our Top 10 list will no doubt give rise to much debate, but at the end of the day, the people who made it to the top are those that the industry considers most influential as judged by the industry itself.

The list was compiled following a three-stage process. In the first stage,Money Managementcanvassed a large cross-section of the financial services industry — including financial advisers (from financial planning, banking, accounting and risk backgrounds), fund managers, researchers, industry consultants, risk specialists, banks and industry associations — for nominations.

At the same time, and importantly,Money Managementinvited industry notables to join a panel that would judge the final Top 10.

Stage two involved compiling a shortlist from the 60 nominations received. This was an interesting process because nominees included some unlikely candidates, such as Saddam Hussein and George W Bush, “for stock market uncertainty and the price of oil”, and Billy Connolly for “positively influencing public opinion of managed funds”.

To make it to the shortlist, nominees had to have been nominated by more than one person — so it was curtains for Saddam, George and Billy.

In stage threeMoney Managementchaired a round-table conference to discuss the merits of the remaining 24 nominees with the panel selected in stage one.

Money Managementproved it had chosen its panelists well — three of them were also shortlisted for consideration on the Top 10 list. To remove any suggestion of bias, panelists who were also on the shortlist were asked to absent themselves from the table while their merits were discussed by the remaining panel members. To further reduce bias, voting was conducted by secret ballot and the final list compiled at the offices ofMoney Management.

Come judgement day, the panel was made up of seven people: chief executive officer of the Financial Planning Association (FPA), Ken Breakspear; the New South Wales director of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA), Roger Holt; respected researcher Stephen van Eyk (van Eyk Research); educator Nina Hope (IntegraTec); industry consultant, Tom Collins (the Tom Collins Consultancy); adviser Robert M C Brown (Bridgeport); and funds management representative Brian Thomas (Credit Suisse).Money Managementreserved the right to vote in the event of a tie-breaker situation, but did not have to exercise its right.

In choosing from the shortlist, the panel was asked to consider what each of the nominees had contributed to financial services this year to make them influential.

This proved to be no easy task — the panel reflected that while it had been a colourful year politically and internationally, on the domestic financial services front, it had been relatively quiet and it was difficult to identify real movers and shakers.

At the end of the day, finalists were selected primarily for building on past reputations and strengthening their influence in the industry.

Money Managementwould like to thank all those involved in our poll as well as the panel for its efforts in drawing up this year’s Top 10 most influential people in financial services.

—Julie Bennett, Managing Editor