Matt Lawler

AMP Advice has partnered with leading fintech Frollo to provide financial advisers, mortgage brokers and their clients with access to Frollo’s Open Banking technology and money management app.

Advisers and brokers in AMP’s network can now select to include Frollo’s Money Management Service as part of their licensee offer and provide their clients with access to a practice-branded version of Frollo’s app.

Clients can then use the technology to create an aggregated view of their financial position and utilise Frollo’s money management capability, including spending visualisations, loan details, budgeting, financial goals and smart insights.

Streamlining the advice process

Advisers and Brokers can securely access a user-friendly view of their clients’ financial information and circumstances through the Frollo platform, streamlining the advice process and enabling more efficient ‘fact finding’ by removing the need for clients to manually provide data. Advisers and brokers can also monitor their client’s ongoing financial position, identifying opportunities to add value.

Open banking benefits

Open Banking under the Consumer Data Right gives consumers the right to securely share their data between service providers. The difference with traditional ways of sharing data is that Open Banking is:

• Regulated – Access to data is only possible through accredited entities, with strict privacy and security protections.
• Rich – Consumer data sharing goes beyond bank transactions, including rates & fees, minimum repayments and credit limits.
• Reliable – Authenticated API connections provide reliable access to data in a consistent format.
• Real-time – High-performance APIs deliver consumer data in < 1 second.

Matt Lawler, AMP Adviser Director said: “Our partnership with Frollo is part of AMP’s strategy to partner with leading fintechs to provide best-in-breed technology solutions to customers, advisers and brokers.

“It reflects a commitment to providing our advice network with a contemporary and market-leading service proposition, which supports the delivery of high-quality advice and broking services.

“Frollo’s technology streamlines the advice process and provides more opportunities for advisers to help their clients. Importantly, the tech platform also sets clients and advisers up to take full advantage of open banking as it evolves into other financial products in the coming years.

“Technology will play a central role in delivering quality advice to more Australians, and we’re committed to providing our network with access to the latest and the best.”

Frollo’s Chief Commercial Officer Simon Docherty says: “This partnership validates what we’ve been saying for a while now, that the Trusted Adviser Model will drive a lot of the adoption in Open Banking this year.

Financial advisers and mortgage brokers are close to their clients and have a real need for efficient and secure sharing of financial information.

We’re excited that AMP is innovating and offering our Money Management app and Partner Portal to their network, as it helps them build a stronger relationship with their clients and be more proactive with their advice.”

The post AMP Advice strengthens licensee offer by partnering with fintech Frollo appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Matt Lawler

With the industry absorbing yet another wave of regulatory change this month, it’s become clear we need a circuit breaker. The Federal Government’s upcoming Quality of Advice review will be a critical moment for the industry and for Australians. It presents the opportunity to reset the course for how financial advice is regulated and how it is delivered.

Australia requires a thriving community of highly professional and trusted advisers. Yet adviser numbers have continued to fall, not just because of the additional qualifications, increasing standards and greater scrutiny, but also because with such a complicated and regulated advice process, the economics are increasingly hard to justify.

It is in all our interests to have laws that protect and benefit consumers, and promote a service focused, professional and accountable financial advice profession. The flip side, however, is the cost of providing advice has risen significantly and, so too, the cost for Australians to receive advice, meaning fewer are actually benefitting from it. The pendulum has swung too far!

Many advisers have shown great resilience in sticking with the profession. They’ve continued to support their clients and communities through COVID, while managing enormous disruption and change for themselves and their businesses.

Advisers have signed up for additional education requirements, a new set of professional standards, they have accepted the decisions of the independent arbitrator AFCA, they are, as of this month, under the scrutiny of enhanced breach reporting requirements and from next year they will answer to a single disciplinary body for financial advisers. Despite doing some major heavy lifting to sign on for robust compliance and professional standards, the delivery of advice itself remains complicated – and laden with paperwork.

The Quality of Advice review is our opportunity to collectively implement constructive and positive change and to solve for these issues. The Financial Services Council hit the nail on the head with its White Paper, which calls for ‘best interest duty’ to not just be about ticking compliance boxes, recommends a re-work of confusing advice categories and an overhaul of the complex statement of advice process, which has long been a sticking point for advisers. With the standards setting function of FASEA moving to Treasury, there’s also an opportunity to ensure the standards for advisers are fit for purpose, and where necessary make changes, maybe even admit that in some areas they’ve gone too far and make considered decisions to wind back some requirements.

We need industry, government and regulators working together. Encouragingly Senator Jane Hume earlier this year signalled the Quality of Advice review will consider affordability of advice, not just quality. We require reform which benefits both consumers and advisers, rather than perpetuating an unsustainable regulatory burden. The Terms of Reference for the Review should include identifying opportunities for deregulation – there is a regulatory balance that needs to be found, because we don’t have it right. There is also an opportunity for the industry to work together to come up with ideas to help reduce the unnecessary complexity in the advice process.

Australia can learn from the experience of other markets, in particular the UK, where the advice industry went through its own regulatory overhaul following the GFC. CoreData recently highlighted how the UK regulator and industry are now working more closely together to develop advice systems and processes and ensure compliance. We welcome the approach of the new ASIC Chair Joe Longo and see an opportunity to work closer with the regulator and Government to deliver much needed real and felt change for advisers and their clients. Licensees have a pivotal role to play. It is incumbent upon us to continue to invest in technology, systems and processes that support the efficiency of advice practices, compliance, and the delivery of quality advice. Licensees are as frustrated as the financial advisers we serve, and want to drive this change, but we cannot do it without the support of government and regulators. Collaboration on policy is the key, importantly at the formation phase, not the implementation phase.

Despite all the disruption of recent years, financial advice has a strong future in Australia. But we must now collectively turn our attention to how we can support a new era of growth for face-to-face financial advice. It’s in all our interests.

By Matt Lawler, Managing Director

The post How to make financial advice work for all Australians appeared first on AdviserVoice.