Erin Truscott, AFA Rising Star 2016

ANZ and the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) has announced the six finalists for the 2017 AFA Rising Star of the Year Award.

Now in its 13th year, the award recognises advisers with a maximum four years’ experience, who have made a valuable contribution during their short time in the industry.

Don Sillar, Head of Sales, ANZ Wealth and Rising Star of the Year award judge, said: “Each year the judges are consistently impressed with this award’s calibre of nominees and 2017 is no exception.

“This year’s finalists have each made a positive impact in this industry through outstanding advice, client service and community engagement.”

Erin Truscott, 2016 AFA Rising Star Award Winner, said “This award is a fantastic platform for young advisers and the development opportunities awarded to this year’s finalists is unprecedented”.

The six finalists will receive a full day Mastering Motivation coaching session exploring tools and techniques that support success in a dynamic industry, before final judging day on 13 September 2017.

The 2017 AFA Rising Star of the Year Award finalists are:

• Andrew Debono – Financial Adviser, Announcer Group
• Karlee Hoog-Antink – Financial Adviser, Elders Financial Planning Mackay
• Keats Brydon – Financial Adviser, Finn Financial Planning
• Lauren Walker – Private Client Adviser, EUROZ Securities Limited
• Mia Taylor – Financial Adviser, Evalesco Financial Services
• Sam Jewell – Financial Adviser, Rising Tide Financial Services

They were selected by a judging panel including:

• Philip Kewin – Chief Executive Officer, Association of Financial Advisers
• Don Sillar – Head of Sales, ANZ Wealth
• Jenny Brown – Founder and Chief Executive Officer, JBS Financial Strategists
• Ben Nash – Financial Adviser and Founder, Pivot Wealth
• Laura Halbert – Head of Marketing, ANZ Wealth
• Chris Browne – Founder & Managing Director, Rising Tide

The winner will be announced at the AFA National Conference, held at the Royal Pines Resort on the Gold Coast from 11-13 October 2017.

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Launched in 2005, the Award is a highly desirable accolade for new advisers providing quality advice, who demonstrate a commitment to education and who are making a valuable contribution to their industry and to their community.

This year’s entrants demonstrated strong capabilities in all areas, highlighting the depth of the talent pool the advice industry is attracting.

AFA CEO Brad Fox says the Australian advice industry has been successful in making financial advice an attractive profession to new entrants, and in highlighting the real demand and need for good financial advice required by all Australians.

“This year’s entrants are particularly strong,” he says. “We are seeing the work the industry has done over the past five or so years to promote our profession now coming through in terms of professional qualifications, experience and most importantly, a desire to provide clear, transparent and trusted advice.”

ANZ Wealth Head of Sales, Don Sillar says, “The professionalism, education and passion of the candidates this year confirmed these Rising Stars are focused on delivering great advice to their clients.”

The 2016 AFA Rising Star of the Year Award finalists are:

• Peter Hodgson – ANZ Financial Planning
• Cathryn Gross – The Wealth Network
• Brent Story – AMP Financial Planning
• Maritza Kriel – Synchron
• Gregory Adam Bloom – Yellow Brick Road
• Erin Truscott – Financial Wisdom

This year’s judging panel included:

• Brad Fox – CEO of AFA
• Jenny Brown – Founder and CEO of JBS Financial Strategists
• Don Sillar – Head of Sales, ANZ Wealth
• Laura Halbert – Head of Marketing, ANZ Wealth
• Chris Browne – Founder Rising Tide and 2007 Rising Star Winner
• Dave Slovinec – State Director SA/NT – AFA
• Matthew Hawkins – State Director TAS – AFA, Director Scanlon Richardson Financial Group

The Award winner will be announced at the AFA National Conference at the National Convention Centre in Canberra on 7 October 2016.

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(L to R): Chris Browne, Catherine Robson, Paul Forbes, Michael Nowak, Eleanor Dartnall, Brad Fox, PJ Byrne, Tapel Cafer, Andy Marshall

On the eve of the Finalist showcase, AdviserVoice gathered together all of the finalists for the AFA Adviser of the Year and Practice of the Year Awards along with awards partner Zurich for a round table discussion to share ideas and canvass industry issues.

Here in the final part of a three part series, we look at the innovations advisers are introducing into their practices and how they see innovation changing the way they do business. (Read the first roundtable here, read the second roundtable here).

Who’s who

Catherine Robson, Affinity Private – Finalist in AFA Adviser of the Year

PJ Byrne, Mr Insurance – Finalist in AFA Adviser of the Year

Eleanor Dartnall, Dartnall Advisers – Winner, AFA Adviser of the Year

Paul Forbes, Robina Financial Solutions – Finalist in AFA Practice of the Year

Chris Browne, Rising Tide – Finalist in AFA Practice of the Year

Tapel Cafer, Complete Financial Balance – Winner, AFA Practice of the Year

Michael Nowak, Joe Nowak Financial Services Group and National President of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)

Brad Fox, CEO of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)

Andy Marshall, Head of Sales Strategies and Research for Zurich’s retail risk business

———-

AdviserVoice: How does innovation manifest itself in your business?

Catherine Robson

Catherine Robson: The challenge for me as a small business owner is not getting too distracted by the bright shiny idea. Innovation is fantastic but it’s absolutely useless without good implementation. So, I have an advisory board that does that for me, who’s like, “Yeah, yeah, sounds interesting. How are we going to implement it sustainably? How is it actually going to work?”

AdviserVoice: So, what are some of the ideas that they’ve said “yes” to?

Catherine Robson: The big challenge we’ve got at the moment is to build an international team for part of our administration capability and the opportunity to find really well-qualified people that really care about doing a good job. So, you know, for us, we’ll have one of our team in the Philippines and culturally it’s our obligation to make sure that she’s absolutely part of our team and she’s embedded with our values and she’s had the opportunity to spend time in Australia to understand what we do. So, it’s a very serious commitment for us.

I think one of the things that’s been brilliant for us in terms of having a team member who’s integral to our work that sits in a remote location is that your processes need to be absolutely spot-on because you can’t just wander over to their desk and go, “I didn’t really mean that, I meant this.” So, that has been excellent for us in terms of thinking about the scalability of our business because it’s put the acid on us to really explain properly and have discipline around what are the processes and how do we automate them.

Tapel Cafer

Tapel Cafer: From a technology perspective, we’re very fortunate we have some individual capabilities with our practice that are amazing and we have built some capabilities that are significantly better than XPLAN in regards to the way it produces material that makes it easy to understand. But the only reason we could do that is because we have absolute geeks who at night go home and play with Excel and they love it.

PJ Byrne: One of the best innovations we’ve put into the business is our online review system. So, we were doing the traditional send a letter out to invite someone for an annual review, do the checklist, and here’s a reply paid envelope, and that got sent off in a mail box and then I didn’t really know if it got there. And then, occasionally, a form would come back saying want to increase or decrease or whatever.

So, in February we started sending it out on email, and it’s awesome. It’s actually an invitation for review and they’ve got four buttons to choose from – “Yes, I’d like to catch up for review”. Another is “No, thanks. I don’t want a review this year. Happy with everything.”

PJ Byrne

From a compliance point, we get that straight back, straight into the database. Another button on there is, “Yes, please, investigate a claim,” because we want to re-wake them up to say, “Hey, if you’ve had any serious illness or injury let us know”.

Paul Forbes: For us, clients actually do like phone calls and they do like some physical sort of contact versus the social media.

We’re now moving to XPLAN and we’ve built templates all through that to make sure we remember to touch base after three months. It pops up at the start of the week to say ring these two people to say hello and make sure they’ve got everything, we haven’t spoken to them for three months. And, if they have, there’s a file note there that someone’s already spoken to them in the last three months. But it just keeps reminding us to touch base with these people because they don’t remember emails, they remember telephone calls.

Paul Forbes

Eleanor Dartnall: Along the technology side, I’m no geek. I’m the wrong generation. So, I pulled my son who is a geek out of his job and he worked with us full-time for six months. He built our websites and for Blueprint which is for our young people, we feed them all of their advice because they’re too busy to come in for a one-on-one meeting. They have a one-on-one journey right through to the statement of advice and giving us informed consent. From then on, they haven’t got time. So, if I want to know how they’re going, we don’t call them up; we text them.

The next thing, of course, is we’ve got all these clients who have to do corporate actions, so instead of getting it all out in the mail, they’ve all got to login to the website for their client advice that they get automatically that generates an email, “Please check, sign in, have a look at your advice,” and then they have to push a button, “Yes, we want to accept that corporate action or we don’t.” The default, if they don’t get back to us is we decline them. Can’t tell you how many hours that’s saved – huge. And compliance has signed off on it.

Chris Browne: My frustration is that we don’t have a big safety net under new entrants to the financial advice industry, so about two and a half months ago we launched a business called Club RT. It’s got three pillars. It’s got business coaching because, you know, you can get someone like [Catherine Robson] leaving the National Australia Bank as the best financial planner in Australia but what they forget is they don’t have the business acumen to run a business and know the right time to hire staff and how to indoctrinate them into the culture and they don’t consider the systems and processes. The second one is just licensing infrastructure, giving these new entrants access to Worksorted so they can do their commission and fee reconciliation.

Eleanor Dartnall

And the final pillar is the serviced office because, if I think about Chris Browne eight years ago, I was working down at the front bedroom of my house in Yarraville and it looks bad. So, rather than expecting new entrants to spend $36,000 a year on rent and getting an office out in Sunbury, we’re saying, “Well, work at home 50 percent of the time but, when you need to meet with the client, when you need to share a coffee with a mate to work out what went wrong in that last appointment or what went right, you’ve actually got an environment where you can do this.”

AdviserVoice: Okay. So, what’s the next big thing? We’re looking into the future, into our crystal balls. What does the next 12 months hold?

Brad Fox

Brad Fox: The next couple of years holds the most enormous opportunity for financial advice there has ever been. The demographic demand for advice is going to explode to around about 3,000 to 4,000 people a week retiring four years from now. The challenge for us is how well we want to meet the supply for advice and it’s got to be quality.

Chris Browne: I think the big change over the course of the next 12 months is that we need to raise the bar. It’s not just an accreditation like the CFP or AFA’s equivalent FChFP. It’s coupled with experience. I think that young advisers need to be sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with experienced advisers and they need to be in good businesses – you know, well-systematized businesses.

Chris Browne

Paul Forbes: I think the unintended consequence of FOFA is really moving everything away from product to advice. It’s a much safer world to live in. We’re going to see naked pricing, we’re going to see rebates gone, we’re going to see people actively using rebates to reduce prices to clients, and that’s when we can sit back and say to the client, “That’s what I’ll charge you. That’s all there is to it.”

Catherine Robson: I love the technology. It’s beautiful and it really does some sensational things around helping you manage your behaviour. So, I think, as an industry, we need to recognize that we could be wrong footed really easily by something like a beautiful solution to finances. If we’re not really clear on what value we add we could find ourselves being irrelevant dinosaurs.

Andy Marshall

Andy Marshall: If you see a shift in changing remuneration or pricing models, particularly with insurance, and it gets back to the quality of advice that’s actually being given, there are a lot of advisers who won’t be able to survive in that world because currently their proposition is “I’ll shop around next year and wait for the best prices”. And so, it’s going to come back to that: how are you packaging up that value of advice discussion and, if someone does it on technology, that’s a massive game-changer.

———-

The Association of Financial Advisers Awards gave separate recognition to the best individual adviser and to best advice practice for the first time this year. The winners were announced at the AFA National Adviser Conference, to be held in Cairns, October 12-14. Zurich has proudly partnered with the Adviser of the Year Award since its inception in 2003 and now also for the inaugural Practice of the Year Award.

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(L to R): Chris Browne, Catherine Robson, Paul Forbes, Michael Nowak, Eleanor Dartnall, Brad Fox, PJ Byrne, Tapel Cafer, Andy Marshall

On the eve of the Finalist showcase, AdviserVoice gathered together all of the finalists for the AFA Adviser of the Year and Practice of the Year Awards along with awards partner Zurich for a round table discussion to share ideas and canvass industry issues.

Here in the second of a three part series, we look at the reputation of financial advisers in the broader community and what can be done to improve it. (Read the first roundtable here, read the third roundtable here).

Who’s who

Catherine Robson, Affinity Private – Finalist in AFA Adviser of the Year

PJ Byrne, Mr Insurance – Finalist in AFA Adviser of the Year

Eleanor Dartnall, Dartnall Advisers – Winner, AFA Adviser of the Year

Paul Forbes, Robina Financial Solutions – Finalist in AFA Practice of the Year

Chris Browne, Rising Tide – Finalist in AFA Practice of the Year

Tapel Cafer, Complete Financial Balance – Winner, AFA Practice of the Year

Michael Nowak, Joe Nowak Financial Services Group and National President of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)

Brad Fox, CEO of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)

Andy Marshall, Head of Sales Strategies and Research for Zurich’s retail risk business

 ———-

AdviserVoice: How do you think that advisers are perceived now compared to, say, 12 months ago or 24 months ago?

Tapel Cafer

Tapel Cafer: It’s declined, because if you Google “financial planning” now, you’ll get snippets of what happened to Commonwealth Bank and Macquarie and blah blah blah. So, really, with what’s happened recently, it probably has tarnished our industry a little bit.

Paul Forbes: Advisers are the meat in the sandwich in the campaign between instos and industry funds and that’s really hurt us. It’s got nothing to do with advice. Industry funds keep coming out and saying “we don’t pay advisers or we don’t pay commissions” – of course they don’t, they don’t do advice. So, every time I see social media jump up and all the responses come up from advisers and they shred each other. Wake up to yourselves for goodness sake. This has nothing to do with us.

Brad Fox: We’ve been on the record a number of times as reminding the industry funds that they’re a product provider. The challenge is with how they’re developing their models at the moment. They want to be an advice provider but they want to do it without meeting the same best interest test that other advisers do.

AdviserVoice: Do you think that there are any other wedge drivers? Any other manipulators of image?

Paul Forbes

Chris Browne: Ease of entry. I saw Ray White is moving into financial planning. I look at that and I think if I wasn’t in the industry, my perception of the industry would lower again. I think there needs to be more rigor to be a financial planner – education and shoulder-to-shoulder experience.

Catherine Robson: I think, as an industry, we need to move from advocacy about ourselves to advocacy on our behalf by consumers because we’re doing such as good job. It’s got to be us as an industry being judged by our actions, not our words.

Catherine Robson

But I think there’s also power in actually advocating for other advisers. Part of what this forum is all about to me is the connection the advisers make with each other. And having had the opportunity to get to know Eleanor [Dartnall] so well over the last 12 months, there’s another adviser that I would trust with my own family. So when there’s a client that I can’t look after, it’s fantastic to have that, and also to be able to tell the story about why another adviser is fantastic. And, as a community of advisers, I think that’s a really good investment for us to make.

Brad Fox: When we talk about being profession, that’s what professions do, they don’t tear each other apart.

Catherine Robson: Just because you’re a profession doesn’t make everyone fantastic, but I think you raise the bar to the point where you feel comfortable that there are people that you genuinely trust.

AdviserVoice: What’s one idea that you have at the top of your head that could help turn the reputation around?

Chris Browne

Michael Nowak: I’d start with mainstream journalists. We need to educate them. I believe that they’re starting with a very low level of knowledge about what advisers do and the benefits that we provide, and we could make some huge inroads if we just engage them over time and if they’re aware of how we help Australians.

Chris Browne: I think we’ve just got to roll out the right advisers to them, you know? It’s got to be people of this calibre as opposed to anyone.

Michael Nowak

Brad Fox: Just imagine we got half the advisers in Australia next week, say 8,000 of them, to tell one true recent claim story to a thousand people: we just communicated to 8 million Australians – a third of the population – in a week about what you do. It’s not hard.

Catherine Robson: Being part of an industry body is such an important value add for me, particularly as a business owner, because you get the opportunity to meet advisers and hear what they’re doing. Why do you think there aren’t more advisers who are joining the industry bodies and being part of it?

Brad Fox: There is no motivation in their mind to need to do it, and that can be an experienced adviser who thinks they already have the work that they need or it might be someone that just doesn’t earn enough to want to spend $500 on a membership. It seems quite ridiculous but they’re the sorts of responses that you get.

AdviserVoice: What’s the proportion of advisers who are members of a body?

Brad Fox: Well, 16,000 to 18,000 advisers is the commonly used number and about half of them. There’s a risk that they might water down a great culture. So, we’ve actually got to manage that as we’re going to go through the announcements that have been made over the last six weeks by different bodies and different licensees about going towards compulsory membership of a professional body. We’ve got to make sure that we get to interact face-to-face with those advisers to bring them into our culture rather than let them think it’s a tick-a-box exercise – “I’m now a better adviser.”

Brad Fox

Chris Browne: To indoctrinate them into the AFA culture, I reckon we should actually create accreditation around ethics – train people around ethical issues.

Brad Fox: We actually have one, Chris. It’s one of the four units for the Fellow Chartered Financial Practitioner FChFP. When you’ve done that one unit, it’s all ethics, you qualify for the entry level designation Associated Chartered Financial Practitioner AChFP.

Chris Browne: Well, I think it needs to sit in a silo and it needs to tackle things like pricing, it needs to tackle things like churning, it needs to roll out people like us because I’ve sat down with countless young advisers who have got their first job with a bloke out in Boronia who’s a pretty average adviser and they actually think that they’re doing the right thing. They actually think that (behaviour like) churning is okay.

Brad Fox: That’s one of the options the board is considering is to how we land on that and when can we land on that.

Tapel Cafer: We need a multi-prong approach. We talked about the younger generation we need to educate, but when you’ve got the older group who are educating young advisers in the old style we need to tackle them as well. There’s so many fires here we’ve got to tackle from so many angles, it’s an intergenerational thing.

———-

The Association of Financial Advisers Awards gave separate recognition to the best individual adviser and to best advice practice for the first time this year. The winners were announced at the AFA National Adviser Conference, to be held in Cairns, October 12-14. Zurich has proudly partnered with the Adviser of the Year Award since its inception in 2003 and now also for the inaugural Practice of the Year Award.

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Deborah Kent

The Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) announced its new Board of Directors (the Board) at the AFA National Adviser Conference in Cairns yesterday, with former AFA Treasurer, Deborah Kent, appointed National President for a two-year term.

Ms Kent said the incoming Board is committed to the AFA Strategic Plan, and each member brings a range of different experiences and talents to the table.

“This Board comes to the helm at an incredibly challenging and exciting time for the advice profession,” she said. “All directors have clearly expressed their desire for the AFA to continue living up to our reputation as the association of choice for financial advisers.”

Every director on the AFA Board is required to be a practising financial adviser. “This contributes to the strong pro-advice advocacy the AFA provides on behalf of our members and their clients. It’s a strong, energetic team,” she said.

Ms Kent is also chair of the AFA Inspire initiative and was appointed to the role of AFA Treasurer earlier year from the role of NSW State Director. Ms Kent has owned her financial planning practice, Integra Financial Services, for over 18 years.

AFA CEO Brad Fox acknowledged the attributes Ms Kent brings to the role. “Deb has already made a significant contribution to the AFA and is well-equipped to lead the Association,” Mr Fox said. “She brings experience, enthusiasm and candour to what is a very demanding role.”

Mr Fox recognised the considerable achievements of outgoing board members, including Michael Nowak’s contribution as National President over the last two years.

“Michael’s contribution to the AFA in his time as National President has been instrumental to our overall vision for the future of financial advice,” he said. “He and his Board worked tirelessly to provoke new thinking and ideas to help the AFA grow, to develop professionalism in advice and to represent our members and their clients with authentic leadership and conviction in what has been a very challenging two years for financial advice.”

The AFA has welcomed three new Board members for a two-year term including 2013 AFA Adviser of the Year Jenny Brown to the role of Vice President, 2008 AFA Rising Star winner Chris Browne as Victorian State Director and James Ford as WA State Director. Former Victorian State Director Steve Crawford was elected to the role of Treasurer.

The 2014-2016 AFA Board:

Executive Directors

• President – Deborah Kent
• Vice President – Jenny Brown
• Treasurer – Steve Crawford

State Directors

• NSW- Jeff Thurecht
• VIC- Chris Browne
• QLD- Dianne Charman
• SA- David Slovenic
• WA- James Ford
• TAS- Matthew Hawkins

The post AFA announces new board appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Chris Browne, Catherine Robson, Paul Forbes, Michael Nowak, Eleanor Dartnall, Brad Fox, PJ Byrne, Tapel Cafer, Andy Marshall

On the eve of the Finalist showcase, AdviserVoice gathered together all of the finalists for the AFA Adviser of the Year and Practice of the Year Awards along with awards partner Zurich for a round table discussion to share ideas and canvass industry issues.

Here in the first of a three part series, we look at their view of the state of financial literacy and what financial advisers are doing to help raise standards of financial literacy within the community. (Read the second roundtable here, read the third roundtable here).

Who’s who

• Catherine Robson, Affinity Private – Finalist, AFA Adviser of the Year
• PJ Byrne, Mr Insurance – Finalist, AFA Adviser of the Year
• Eleanor Dartnall, Dartnall Advisers – Finalist, AFA Adviser of the Year
• Paul Forbes, Robina Financial Solutions – Finalist, AFA Practice of the Year
• Chris Browne, Rising Tide – Finalist, AFA Practice of the Year
• Tapel Cafer, Complete Financial Balance – Finalist, AFA Practice of the Year
• Michael Nowak, Joe Nowak Financial Services Group and National President of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)
• Brad Fox, CEO, Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)
• Andy Marshall, Head of Sales Strategies and Research for Zurich’s retail risk business

——————–

AdviserVoice: First of all, I’d like to hear from you all how you’d rate your own clients’ financial literacy, specifically in relation to insurance issues.

Catherine Robson

Catherine Robson: We deal with professional people who are often very highly educated and take notice of financial issues. While they know their facts and figures, they find it difficult to apply that to themselves and their own behaviour, and so that’s why they need an adviser. And I think one of the blind spots for them is insurance because while, theoretically, they know that it’s a good idea, somehow, they think they are exempt from the laws of the universe and it’s not going to happen to them.

PJ Byrne: We have a client base that spreads across the Australian demographic so we do mums and dads through to business owners. In terms of clients’ literacy, it’s just about encouraging them to invest the time to

PJ Byrne

understand what they need to understand and get it right the first time, and that’s where advisers can make a difference – to tell them that you do get what you pay for.

Paul Forbes: I think people actually understand the broader context but I don’t think they understand how it applies to them. So, if I look at the people who come to us, some of them will understand it. They will have done quite well in their lives. But one of the questions they really don’t get is “How much is enough?” They actually don’t know when they can retire.

Chris Browne: We spend a lot of time in the early days just bringing them up to speed. We don’t talk about

Paul Forbes

insurance; we talk about “What’s your Plan B?” and I think that’s talking in their language as opposed to our language, and I think that’s really, really important. And, also, it’s important to know that there is no silver bullet and we need to consider things like internet clips on YouTube. We need to think about going out and educating people in their work places, and we need to think about the wider media.

Eleanor Dartnall: We had a huge financial literacy issue with self-funded

Chris Browne

retirees. Most of those clients were professional. You had to insist that they brought their spouse with them because the assets were also in their name, and I had quite a journey to get them to realize that I needed to teach their wives. You know, I had to use very mundane language. I would say “if you’re a 70-year-old engineer, it’s a monty that you’re going to go first and your wife’s going to be vulnerable to the first bit of rubbish advice she gets”. And then, they’ll say, “Well, will you teach her?”

AdviserVoice: What are the barriers to better financial literacy?

Tapel Cafer: When we’re talking about the younger generation, this is a serious topic that they actually haven’t listened to because it’s not really going to apply to them. So, you’ve got to find different ways to relate to them. You could be using comic sketch via social media to get to get to that audience.

Eleanor Dartnall

Chris Browne: The important piece is just meeting clients where they want to be met. I think, too often, we dictate how they interact with our business. You know, it’s the big board room or it’s the stiff meeting room and all that sort of stuff. Some people don’t care about stuff like that.

Brad Fox: I think technology is an enabler. We have to change how we reach out and social media can be part of that, but also reaching different audiences, choosing different language for different audiences, different communication means. We need to change the whole perception about insurance – from a discretionary purchase item in an Australian household to an essential purchase item.

Tapel Cafer

Tapel Cafer: One of the best forms of marketing we have found is actually peer to peer. We’re very big in the medical space and we do a lot of sponsorships at conferences and it’s an educational process. We have a large number of orthopaedic surgeons as clients and registrars as clients, they come in and speak on our behalf. Not only endorsing our company but endorsing the insurance industry because they now truly value the insurance industry because they have lived it. They have lived the trauma of someone being diagnosed or having the accident. They’ve also learned the insurance industry does actually pay – not watching a video, this is actually hearing it from their mouths.

AdviserVoice: How do you get to the people before they come in your door? How do get them to come in your door?

Brad Fox

Brad Fox: Whenever you’re trying to create mass influence, you’ve got to find where the gatekeepers are and how do we influence the influencers which are those gatekeepers. You know school teachers are the classic ones to meet kids.

Chris Browne: Over the course of the last twelve months, we’ve done 18 wealth workshops in small businesses and, sometimes, the person of influence – the CEO of that business – does an introduction and says,  “Bring in the team, they look after my financial affairs. I’m really, really pleased so I’ve invited them in to do a lunchtime session with you”. We’ve found that the amount of traction that we get with that audience is far superior to the opportunities where we’re invited in, we’re doing the presentation but we don’t get the endorsement from the CEO. We might get 50 percent that come along and meet with us, but it’s not the 90 percent that we would with the endorsement from the CEO.

Andy Marshall

Andy Marshall: I did a presentation this week and asked the audience if they knew the Risk Store stats on how many claims were paid out last year? The audience were financial advisers, it was a room of 125 people and no one knew. No-one, that’s appalling because you should know that but it’s also what you then do with that stat because with that stat you can actually make it real and say, “What that actually means, Mr. and Mrs. Client, is that 170-plus families got X million dollars paid out a day.” That would join the dots. They know bad stuff happens but it’s about the reassurance piece and I think what we need to factor is how do you reassure people that there’s something really positive from interacting with an adviser?

———————-

The Association of Financial Advisers Awards will give separate recognition to the best individual adviser and to best advice practice for the first time this year. The winners will be announced at the AFA National Adviser Conference, to be held in Cairns, October 12-14. Zurich has proudly partnered with the Adviser of the Year Award since its inception in 2003 and now also for the inaugural Practice of the Year Award.

The post Roundtable part 1: Financial literacy featuring the AFA Practice of the Year and Adviser of the Year finalists appeared first on AdviserVoice.