Travel agents stay at home for advice

Target markets don’t get much closer than fellow employees, which is a tack that travel group Flight Centre has adopted since the early 90s.

The group provides its 3000-plus employees with access to financial planning services through its internal MoneyWise initiative — a planning service that has a dealers licence through Compound Investments, part of the Count Financial Group.

Through MoneyWise, Flight Centre employs eight financial planners in Australia, four of whom are certified financial planners (CFP) with the remaining four in the process of gaining the mark. Flight Centre also offers the service to staff internationally, with planners in its Canadian, South African, New Zealand and United Kingdom offices.

However, MoneyWise southern regions planner Phil Gard says it is more of a “financial security” service to employees.

“We see ourselves more as financial GPs than exclusively financial planners, as 80 per cent of our time and effort goes into creating manageable budgets for employees and finding ways for them to get out of debt,” says Gard, who has been with MoneyWise for seven and a half of the initiative’s eight year history.

MoneyWise planners are salary based but have a financial incentive based on the number of staff members to whom they provide consultation services.

“We don’t earn as much money as we could in the broader financial planning world but there is great satisfaction in helping employees secure their financial future free from debt and working towards home ownership and so on.”

“Ten to 30 per cent of our employees are at a stage of contemplating buying a house and we direct those people to our in-house loan broker, who is based in Queensland,” Gard says.

The planning service is free and confidential to all Flight Centre staff.

“Most of our clients [Flight Centre employees] don't have the financial means to see the average financial planner, but at Flight Centre these are some of the people we can help most of all and we are there for the long haul,” says MoneyWise Queensland-based manager John van Rooden.

MoneyWise has three planners in NSW, two in Queensland, two in Victoria and one in Western Australia, who shares responsibility for SA with one of the Victorian-based planners.

One MoneyWise Victorian planner was recently sent to Los Angeles in the US, to provide advice to its 70 staff there.

Gard says Flight Centre is likely to offer its services externally to other travel-focused organisations in the near future, such as Qantas, Virgin and travel insurer Cover-More.

Flight Centre also offers employees services relating to car insurance, house insurance, wills, private healthcare and cash management accounts (with no minimum sum required) according to Gard.