Fisher will join VBP on June 1 as CEO, replacing Nathan Jacobsen, who was appointed Chief Operating Officer of VBP parent company, AZ NGA, in January but continued to oversee the management of VBP.

Fisher’s appointment brings an experienced and dedicated leader to VBP at an important time for the business with advice firms increasingly looking to business partners for support to adopt new technologies like automation and AI, improve cyber security and risk management, and scale sustainably, according to Jacobsen.

“Mark is a highly respected leader with proven experience running successful businesses, driving growth initiatives and leading large teams through periods of change and disruption, and we are very excited to have him on board to take VBP forward,” he said.

“Over the past few years, VBP has expanded its services and offer to advice, accounting and mortgage broking businesses, and opened new offices in Cagayan De Oro, in the Philippines. The business has ambitious plans to continue growing and delivering a broad range of outsourcing services to clients.”

Prior to Godfrey Pembroke, Fisher was Managing Director of Securitor Financial Group. He also previously held senior executive roles at BT Financial Group, Macquarie Private Wealth and AXA.

“I’m excited to join VBP and grow the group’s position as a leading specialist of outsourced services and solutions to financial advisers and accountants,” Fisher said.

“VBP is also passionate about being a great place to work and providing career development opportunities for its people, which I strongly believe in.”

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Nathan Jacobsen

Principal advisers looking to build large, highly profitable businesses must choose between being a great adviser or a great chief executive officer because, at scale, they can’t be both, according to outsourcing specialists, Vital Business Partners (VBP).

In a new paper titled, From cottage industry to professional companies: VBP’s guide to scaling with confidence, the outsourcing firm claims that fast growing firms often encounter significant challenges, including declining earnings, in the initial stages of scaling up because they don’t have the resources and capability to manage the complexity that comes with running a larger business.

However, this trap is avoidable if founders can develop their leadership skills or bring in leaders with the right experience and skillset, the guide claims.

Nathan Jacobsen, VBP chief executive officer, said that businesses focused on accelerating growth through M&A and organic activity needed to remove principal dependency by having clearly defined roles and responsibilities, formal systems and processes for efficiently deliver advice, and a robust risk management framework.

“A declining EBITDA margin is not inevitable, demonstrated by at least some of the many thriving large advice businesses, but scaling a small-to-medium firms requires different choices and skills around operational efficiency, risk management, people leadership and strategy,” he said.

VBP’s guide provides insights into the process of scaling up, based on the group’s experience working with hundreds of advice firms. It aims to help principal advisers determine if that strategy is the right path for them.

Jacobsen, who is also chief operating officer of VBP’s parent company AZ NGA, said scaling up had the potential to deliver many benefits, such as operational and cost efficiencies, better access to capital, and a more structured approach to growth, but it was not for everyone.

“Building and running a successful business of scale requires a lot of hard work and significant ongoing investment in people, systems, processes and technology, which many people do not have the skill, experience or risk appetite to undertake,” he said.

For those that do, size has many advantages and we’re seeing a clear trend of businesses scaling, as heightened regulatory scrutiny and rising compliance costs put pressure on businesses to drive efficiencies and improved client outcomes.”

The VBP guide identifies and defines the two main types of advice businesses and the various challenges, opportunities and risks they face when it comes to scaling. It outlines key considerations for business owners before pursuing an aggressive growth strategy and provides a rough blueprint for scaling up.

Read the report.

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Sue Viskovic

Top advice firms display operational maturity, which is evidenced by ten essential characteristics, leading to EBIT margins of 35-40 per cent and employee and client satisfaction scores of 90+ per cent, according to a new paper produced by Vital Business Partners (VBP), in partnership with Zurich Financial Services Australia (Zurich).

Titled, Optimum Operating Models for Advice Firms, the paper examines how advice firms are redesigning their operations and leveraging AI and automation to address key challenges, namely the requirement to do more with less, due to declining adviser numbers, mounting compliance requirements and rising client expectations.

Leveraging VBP’s experience working with advice businesses of all sizes, the report details the ten foundational building blocks of a high-performance operating model, including clarity of roles, documented processes and measurable service standards, backed by “leadership that leans in”.

According to Sue Viskovic, Head of Consulting at VBP, efficiency alone is no longer enough to guarantee success.

It is how a firm is structured, including its organisational design, team architecture and operational model, that determines its ability to consistently deliver high quality advice and client outcomes at scale.

“The firms that thrive are those that combine structure, systems and leadership to create businesses that are both scalable and sustainable,” Viskovic said.

“At their core, they’re also client obsessed. Client service is cultural not positional, and everyone in the firm, from the front line to back office, shares responsibility for delivering an excellent client experience.”

In addition to qualitative attributes, the VBP report also provides eight quantitative metrics to help readers define a high-performance advice firm and benchmark their own performance.

These factors include EBIT margins of circa 35-40 per cent, high employee and client advocacy, revenue of around $1 million per annum per licensed adviser, and an employee cost ratio of 45 per cent or less.

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Nathan Jacobsen

Outsourcing specialists, Vital Business Partners (VBP) has urged financial advice businesses to review their outsourcing arrangements to ensure adequate governance and risk management, following the Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s recent review into the use of offshore service providers by financial services entities.

VBP has also released an 18-page guide detailing how the group is assisting advice businesses to meet their legal obligations in relation to outsourcing.

Last month, ASIC released the findings of its year-long review of offshore outsourcing identifying significant variations in the quality of risk management arrangements in relation to the use of offshore staff and calling on licensees and advice businesses to regularly assess the performance and suitability of their outsourcing arrangements.

Nathan Jacobsen, Chief Executive Officer of VBP, said the ASIC report highlighted the wide discrepancies that can exist between outsourcing models in terms of governance and compliance, reinforcing the value of partnering with an experienced outsourced service provider (OSP) that had proactive oversight and strong risk management capabilities to protect both clients and advice businesses.

“VBP is highly supportive of ASIC’s recommendations and heightened focus on offshore outsourcing to ensure that both consumers and advice businesses are not unnecessarily exposed to harm, such as their data being stolen through cyber incidents,” he said.

“Whether a business has a direct outsourced contracting arrangement or uses an intermediary, the obligations around areas like data, privacy and cyber security are the same. For those that choose to go direct, sole responsibility for assessing and monitoring outsourcing risk can be a significant burden.”

According to ASIC, licensees and advisers are exposed to critical risks associated with the loss of control over key functions to OSPs, disruptions to operational services and conflicting obligations due to foreign laws, requiring them to urgently close governance gaps and address weaknesses in their use of offshore providers.

Jacobsen said the advice and wealth management industry could expect greater scrutiny of offshore outsourcing arrangements, given the large and growing number of businesses outsourcing tasks to enable them to scale sustainably, improve performance and focus on seeing clients. www.virtualbusinesspartners.com.au Commercial in Confidence +61 (0)2 8999 9696 2

“It is in the best interests of consumers, advisers and the broader industry that all parties involved in the provision of advice, including suppliers and contractors, operate with a continuous focus on improving information security practices,” he said.

“The risks are only rising guaranteeing further regulatory scrutiny, and possibly intervention, if the industry cannot effectively and proactively manage these risks.”

VBP maintains a governance and risk management framework that meets the standards set out in Section 912A(1)(h) of the Corporations Act and the group’s internal controls, compliance programs and risk assessment processes are aligned with international standards, ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 31000:2018.

VBP’s frameworks are reviewed annually and actively supported by senior management to ensure ongoing regulatory alignment and operational resilience.

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Nathan Jacobsen

Financial planning business, RI Toowoomba Group, has significantly expanded its relationship with outsourcing specialists, Vital Business Partners (VBP), by adding four financial planning assistants and upskilling existing senior financial planning assistants to provide paraplanning services.

Steve Browning, Chief Operating Officer, RI Toowoomba Group, said the business had grown quickly over the past year, primarily through M&A, creating a relatively urgent need for capable back-office resources to support the group’s advice team, which is spread across five locations including Brisbane, Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast.

This led RI Toowoomba Group to engage VBP to increase its number of outsourced staff based in the Philippines to nine, up from five previously.

Locally, the business has 35 employees including thirteen advisers.

“We’ve had a strong partnership with VBP since 2018. Over that time, we had a stable team of five in Cebu but as a result of recent acquisitions, our VBP resources have almost doubled to ensure we continue to deliver reliable service and operational excellence,” Browning said.

“VBP gives us the confidence to focus on M&A opportunities and continue growing because we know they are there to support us to scale our back-office, and build and manage our offshore team.”

Nathan Jacobsen, Chief Executive Officer of VBP said advice businesses, particularly those growing quickly, needed access to a large, qualified pool of talent to perform back-office functions and free business leaders to focus on value creation and strategic initiatives.

“Advisers are time-poor and many have ambitious goals and targets so they shouldn’t be distracted by day-to-day administration,” he said.

“Demand for advice has never been higher, due to demographic changes, the increasing complexities of life, and heightened global economic and geopolitical uncertainty.”

“Advisers are working extremely hard to help clients understand their position and manage their affairs. They need a trusted, experienced partner to come alongside them to help recruit, train and manage teams, so they can focus on helping people and growing their business.”

Established in 1992, RI Toowoomba Group specialises in financial planning and retirement advice to mass affluent people living in regional Queensland.

The group’s business strategy focuses on achieving the necessary scale in key markets, expanding into new regions, and enhancing operational efficiency by streamlining processes and digitising the client experience.

“We’ve had some challenges in recent years, namely too many clients and not enough advisers, so we set out to solve that problem by acquiring like-minded businesses in areas where we had existing clients but not a local presence,” Browning said.

“We identified areas where we had large cohorts of clients and found quality businesses and people that had capacity to take care of existing clients, look after our clients in the area, and continue growing too. With VBP, we’ve been able to support those businesses and focus on executing our strategy.”

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Jacobsen’s appointment follows the recent decision by David Carney, VBP Co-founder and longstanding CEO, to step back from day-to-day management to focus on business development, marketing and innovation.

Paul Barrett, Chairman of VBP and CEO of AZ NGA, said Jacobsen’s track record of successfully transforming wealth management businesses and his experience in strategy, technology and M&A strongly positioned him to lead VBP into its next phase of growth.

“Nathan is a highly respected financial services executive and we are extremely fortunate to have him on board to lead this dynamic business. VBP’s vision and purpose is to support professional advisory firms to grow and deliver generational change for their clients and, over the last decade, it has become an invaluable business partner to some of Australia’s best advice businesses,” Barrett said.

“David Carney has done an incredible job of turning VBP into Australia’s leading adviser services utility and we are pleased that he will remain with the business to facilitate a smooth leadership transition and play a key role in the group’s ongoing success.”

In his new role as Head of Growth, Carney will report to Jacobsen.

VBP was established in 2013 by David Carney and David Deegan to deliver a range of outsourced business solutions including financial planning administration, accounting and bookkeeping, paraplanning and mortgage broking support.

In 2023, the group acquired Elixir Consulting, significantly expanding its capability and capacity to provide business coaching, strategy and consulting.

The Australian-owned, Sydney and Philippines-based group, which has over 1250 team members and 260 clients, is a Certified B Corporation (B Corp) and has consistently been recognised by Great Place to Work.

According to Jacobsen, the skills shortage in Australia was holding businesses back from helping more people, which increased the need and relevance of VBP’s proposition.

“One of the biggest challenges facing businesses is finding and maintaining talent, and VBP is ideally positioned to help advisers solve that problem. There is also an exciting opportunity to help advisers achieve scale and efficiency benefits through process optimization and the effective use of technology,” he said.

“I am excited to lead this fantastic business, as we continue investing in people, products and solutions.”

Jacobsen departed Diverger in March, following the group’s merger with Count. Prior to his role at Diverger, he held a number of senior positions including Managing Director of Paragem and General Manager of Perpetual Private.

He was also formerly an officer in the Australian Navy.

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Sue Viskovic

VBP has created three new roles in its leadership team to assist the firm’s continued expansion in the financial advice industry.

The appointments follow VBP’s recent acquisition of specialist financial planning consulting and coaching firm Elixir Consulting.

Amanda Yun joins VBP as chief growth officer and Shaun Nesbitt has been appointed chief information and digital officer. In addition, Elixir founder Sue Viskovic will become VBP’s general manager consulting.

David Carney, VBP’s chief executive officer, says the appointments as well as the acquisition will help take VBP’s evolution to the next level.

“We are significantly expanding our service offering to continue supporting our clients with their growth at a time of continuing change in the financial planning landscape.

“VBP has a 10-year track record of providing this support and with the addition of Amanda and Shaun to the business, as well as the expertise of the Elixir team, we have significantly deepened the level of assistance we can provide,” he says.

He added that the combined business of VBP and Elixir will position the business as the ‘go to’ growth partner for advice firms looking to innovate and scale.

“Harnessing the experience of Elixir and boosting it with the scale and expertise of VBP means we are better positioned to provide the specialist support and assistance that advice practices need.

“VBP now has the resources to deploy a bespoke team on a project basis to assist clients in executing the priority projects from their strategic planning, and to take full advantage of opportunities in the current environment.

“Over the next year, VBP will focus on helping firms innovate by investing in intelligent automation solutions, cyber and governance security as well as new coaching programs.”

VBP has also recently rebranded from Virtual Business Partners to Vital Business Partners, reflecting its role within the financial advice community and its 10 year track record.

Mr Carney says that while the business will still be widely known as VBP, it was important to make the subtle name change to Vital Business Partners.

“The new name is more reflective of our future direction and desire to be a vital partner in our clients’ future success. Dropping the word Virtual allows us to move away from a traditional outsourcing business and recognises the human connections that are very much the core of each and every client relationship.”

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Founded in 2013, VBP provides off-shore specialist assistance and support to Australian-based financial planning firms, and has recently expanded its services into bookkeeping and accounting.

As part of this expansion, Daniel Harrison has joined VBP as its technical lead – accounting. Reporting to the head of client experience Sarah Matthews, he will be responsible for the development and enhancement of VBP’s accounting offering.

Mr Harrison has worked in the accounting industry in Australia for over 20 years, predominantly in public practice. He has previously run his own accounting practice as well as held management roles in mid-tier accounting firms in NSW.

He has also worked for the Australian Tax Office, is a member of the Institute of Public Accountants and sits on the tax working group for Blockchain Australia.

VBP chief executive officer David Carney said the firm has already begun offering bookkeeping services to clients, and is the first stage of a broader accounting offering that will be ready in the coming months.

“Increasingly our clients are multi-disciplined firms. To date, VBP has been able to provide services to the wealth management and mortgage broking divisions of our clients, but not to their accounting and bookkeeping divisions at the same level of operational excellence,” Mr Carney said.

“With the support of Daniel, we are now realising the opportunity to support their accounting and bookkeeping divisions. It will also support pure financial planning firms to benefit from in-house bookkeeping support around internal payroll functions.”

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David Carney

As more Australian advice firms seek business process outsourcing (BPOs) partners amid a local staffing shortage, they should be vigilant in finding the right partner that aligns with their values, according to Virtual Business Partners (VBP) founder and chief executive, David Carney.

Carney says that while finding the right outsourcing partner can be a time-consuming process, following four simple steps can help:

1. Identify the business

“Look at the business and do a little tyre-kicking from the comfort of your laptop. There is a lot of information about outsourcing firms that can be found by researching on Google,” Carney says.

“Some helpful indicators to consider include whether the partner has a good website with appropriate domain authority.

“You should also find out whether they have a suitable digital footprint of their company when you search them online. For this check, look at LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Facebook, and any other reputable third-party sources that pop up in a Google Search.”

2. Inquire about their service offering

Carney says that once some BPOs that match your needs have been identified, contact a few of them, and monitor of the speed and quality of their responses.

“When you talk to a BPO, they must demonstrate good, responsive turnaround time and processes when responding to your initial inquiry, and have a deeper understanding of your business need,” he says.

“Also determine whether they answer more complex questions competently and whether they openly share information about the company, such as size, years in business and specialties.”

3. Discuss your needs with suitable candidates

Once an advice firm has a good feel from their initial responses from the potential BPOs, Carney says it’s then time to have a more detailed discussion with a short list of firms.

“The sales process for any BPO should feel competent, consultative and not “salesy”, or too aggressive and superficial. You should have conversations with people who can understand your requirements and advise you accordingly. Their advice should be valuable and insightful. The pricing model should be clear and concise.

“A call is also much more powerful than a templated email response, an RFP or PDF proposal. So feel free to get on the phone or Zoom call.”

4. Choose the BPO that best fits your firm’s needs

Finally, Carney notes that there are several different approaches within the outsourcing industry, and that advice firms should take note of these approaches.

“It can be highly educational to speak to a few outsourcing firms about what they do and how they do it,” he says.

“However, be mindful that these BPOs are ultimately all trying to sell you so a certain amount of their insight and advice might be angled to their benefit.”

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Chris Miller has joined VBP as paraplanning technical lead. He is tasked with developing and broadening VBP’s capabilities by providing technical support, learning, development and mentoring to a team of paraplanners, quality assurance analysts and managers.

Mr Miller joins from Focus Partners Financial Services, where he was a paraplanner since January 2020. Before that, he spent four years as both a paraplanner and a financial planner at Generations Personal & Professional Advice in Wodonga, Victoria.

Mr Miller reports to the head of client experience, Sarah Matthews, who was promoted to the newly-created role in January this year. Mrs Matthews was previously VBP’s head of advice delivery, and has been at the firm since December 2019.

VBP provides off-shore specialist assistance and support to Australian-based financial planning firms and was founded in 2013 by financial advice industry veterans David Carney and David Deegan.

Mr Carney said Mr Miller’s skill in working under pressure and adapting to new situations and challenges makes him a perfect paraplanning technical lead.

“Chris is a dedicated financial planning professional with a history of maintaining high levels of technical and compliance support to financial planners and their businesses,” Mr Carney said.

“With a proven history of managing teams of support staff, we believe Chris has what it takes to make a significant impact and effectively meet client expectations and company goals within an expanding VBP team.”

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