Who’s making the most money?

The top dealer group in 2003, by funds under advice (FUA) per planner, was theBerkley Groupwith $63 million.

However, Berkley would have come fifth in last year’s survey and not much better the year before.

In previous years the top groups were averaging between $150 and $160 million per planner.

Berkley came fourth last year with $66 million FUA per planner and was not ranked in 2001.

Similarly, this year’s third placegetter, Clearview Retirement Solutions, dropped from $62.3 million in 2002 to only $58.6 million.

This illustrates the drop in funds under advice being experienced by planners in what are still tough markets.

As usual, it is the smaller dealer groups that dominate the top of the FUA tables, although some medium-sized groups are well represented at the top.

Godfrey Pembrokehas reappeared after missing out in 2002 when it had $40 million FUA per planner. It made the 2001 top 10 with $44 million.

Godfrey Pembroke is one of the few dealer groups to have lifted its FUA per planner this year.

Macquarie Wealth Management and Prescott Consultants, which was folded intoInvestor Group, both slipped off the top 10 this year.

The lack of the big four banks andAMPin the top 10 suggests that while they have control of the general mass market, there is still room for small boutique dealer groups to win valuable business.

Perhaps more interesting is the arrival of the planning arm of a large superannuation fund,State Super, at the number eight position.

Missing from the list is last year’s winnerABN Amro(now including JP Morgan), which did not disclose total FUA.

Sitting in the bottom of the FUA per planner list are two big players —PISandCount. Both have more than 1,000 planners in the dealer group, yet each is only looking after about $4-5 million, which is a long way from the top performing planners.

As the calculations are based on averaging the FUA, our method would fail to pick up top-performing planners in these groups. As in any large organisations, there will be some planners who work harder than others.

The bottom of the list also includes some small dealer groups that would be either working their way up the ladder, or prefer to remain small to deliver a more personalised service.

To see how hard the top dealer groups are working planners, we looked at clients per planners.

The group topping the list with the most clients per planner was Clearview, which was a long way ahead of its rivals.

Two of the big four banks made the list — ANZ in number two and Westpac in the number three position.

AMP was also in the top 10, but with less than half the number of clients per planner than ANZ.

Looking more closely at the figures reveals thatMLC, owned by National, andHillross, owned by AMP, also feature in the top 10, confirming the strong position that the big banks and AMP have on distribution in Australia.

The bottom of the list confirms the positioning of boutique dealer groups with low numbers of clients per planner.

There is some correlation between the top dealer groups with FUA per clients and their positioning at the bottom of the clients-per-planner listing.

The suggestion would be that these planners work more closely with their clients and therefore are rewarded with more funds to advise on.

The calculations for all of these listings are based on figures supplied by the dealer groups.

Each year there is always a certain rounding-up of the figures to the nearest $100, $200 or $500 million.

However, this year there was one dealer group that delivered a very accurate figure … down to the last cent.

Bendigo Investment Services’ FUA was $833,191,670.70. Bankers always did like to make sure every cent is accounted for and the dealer group is no different.

We look forward to more dealer groups being so precise next year.