Doug Morris

Amid ongoing debate by Australian legislators and regulators on the future of financial advice, including how to restore advisor numbers and meet the needs of a growing demographic nearing retirement, the role of technology is both central and critical.

With more than 40% of advisors having exited the industry since the Royal Commission, and 68% of those remaining now choosing to go self-licensed, independent advisors need to be flexible and profitable.

According to research from Sharesight, financial advisors face five key challenges: tech adoption, personalisation, self-managed investing, generational engagement, and cybersecurity. Each challenge also presents a clear opportunity for advisors who embrace digital tools and rethink traditional service models.

“There’s a real opportunity for tech-enabled advice to meet the needs of today’s ‘missing middle’ and tomorrow’s digital-native recipients of the $5.4 trillion generational wealth transfer,” said Doug Morris, CEO of Sharesight.

Sharesight’s research highlights how client expectations are rising, even as advisors are being asked to do more with less. The average advisor now serves 129 clients, up from 83 just five years ago. In this context, automation and personalisation are critical to business viability for independent financial advisors.

“Analysis of recent licensing dynamics shows a major industry trend, as almost half of advisors are switching licensees and choosing to go self-licensed,” Morris said. “It’s being driven by a combination of strategic and financial factors, namely the opportunity to get high-quality advice into the hands of more Australians, and the challenge of running a profitable advice business when you go out on your own.”

Ben Wieland, Partner at EGU, the Brisbane-based bespoke wealth advisors, said digital tools like Sharesight help to improve client conversations and streamline reporting.

“One of the big things to remember is that brokers and funds aren’t reporting houses – they’re just intermediaries to get you the asset. Sharesight fills a gap. Its reporting makes portfolio conversations clearer and more client-focused,” Wieland said.

The ‘missing middle’ is a term that is used to describe an underserved segment whose total wealth, including superannuation, disqualifies them as an ideal fit for a full-service advice model. Many potential clients in this group are looking for a hybrid experience: simple personal advice paired with digital tools.

“Clients who make up the ‘missing middle’ are typically those who want to self-direct their equity investments and superannuation journey,” Morris said. “Simple questions, like how to give the right information to your accountant at tax time, shouldn’t require a complex answer,” he added.

The research also explores how digital portfolio tracking tools like Sharesight help advisors streamline reporting, simplify compliance, and deliver more meaningful conversations with clients – especially in areas like tax reporting, risk analysis, and income planning.

“Digital tools mean advisors can scale efficiently by reaching more clients and expanding access to financial advice. That’s a benefit across the board, to improve Australians’ financial wellbeing, especially in retirement,” Morris said.

Read the research report.

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Doug Morris

Sharesight has integrated with Desktop Broker, allowing advisers to have their clients’ trading data automatically synced to Sharesight’s portfolio tracker. By having Desktop Broker trades automatically populated in Sharesight, advisers can effortlessly track their clients’ investment performance, benefitting from Sharesight’s intraday price and performance data, plus automatic dividend tracking.

What is Desktop Broker?

Desktop Broker is an easy-to-use trading platform with a premium support service and access to research and investment opportunities from Bell Potter. Key features include:

• Peace of mind – Established in 2007, Desktop broker is part of ASX-listed Bell Financial Group (ASX: BFG)
• Better insights – You get exclusive access to Bell Potter research and daily market commentary
• Better adviser support – Tailored solutions to grow your business from a team who understand adviser businesses
• Flexible brokerage – Low-cost trade execution on desktop or mobile
• A proven platform solution – Over 4,500 advisers already use Desktop Broker for their investment decision support and trade executions.

Why has Sharesight connected to Desktop Broker?

“At Sharesight, not only do we help individual investors track their performance and make better investing decisions, but we also make it easier for professional investors to track their clients’ wealth by automatically recording their trading data and providing a consolidated view of their investments,” says Sharesight CEO, Doug Morris.

“With thousands of Australian advisers trading on behalf of their clients using Desktop Broker, it made sense for us to integrate our software to supply advisers with superior performance data while also saving them time on reporting.”

“This integration streamlines advisers’ workflow, enhancing their ability to serve clients efficiently. With the integration, we’re eliminating manual data entry, which reduces errors and frees up valuable time for advisers to focus on what matters most — providing strategic guidance to their clients. This underscores our commitment to innovation and delivering solutions that empower advisers”, says Martyn Johnston, Head of Partnerships at Desktop Broker.

Benefits for advisers

Comprehensive performance reporting: Sharesight shows the true picture of a portfolio’s performance by providing a total annualised return that takes into account the impact of capital gains, dividends, brokerage fees and foreign currency fluctuations. Advisers also gain access to a powerful suite of performance reports designed to help them make better investing decisions, including performance, diversity, exposure, contribution analysis, multi-period, multi-currency valuation, sold securities and future income.

Connect Sharesight and Xero

Sharesight’s software is linked with Xero to provide a seamless solution between portfolio management and portfolio accounting. When advisers connect Sharesight to Xero, details of share purchases, sales and dividends flow into Xero automatically, allowing them to be easily reconciled against bank statements and included in their clients’ overall wealth picture.

Never pay more than you need 

With Sharesight, both advisers and their clients can enjoy the benefit of managing growing portfolios without incurring additional costs.

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Anto Joseph

Sharesight, a leading fintech platform and Stropro are pleased to announce the Stropro alternatives platform has been integrated with Sharesight to provide an elegant ‘whole-of-wealth’ reporting solution for users of both platforms.

This integration will enable Stropro clients to access the portfolio tracking and tax reporting offered by Sharesight.

Investors using Sharesight will also be able to easily access global alternative investment offerings arranged by Stropro.

Stropro is an investment platform that provides access to curated alternative investment strategies, often also referred to as ‘structured investment products’, from the world’s largest investment banks.

Sharesight currently enables over 300,000 investors to track more than 240,000 global stocks, ETFs and managed funds, plus assets such as cash accounts, property and cryptocurrency.

Sharesight is widely regarded as a best-in-class investment tracking and reporting platform that supports over 170 Australian and global brokers.

Commenting on the partnership, Anto Joseph, CEO of Stropro, said: “Our investor community has been rapidly growing their exposure to global alternatives across multiple asset classes through the Stropro platform.

“Many of our clients were requesting an integration with Sharesight, which is a leader in portfolio tracking and reporting, and we are delighted to offer this to enhance the investor experience.”

Stropro was founded by a team of ex-wealth management and technology professionals. The Stropro platform provides investors access to income strategies which offer greater certainty of returns through volatile markets, and growth opportunities targeting emerging global themes.

Doug Morris, CEO of Sharesight commented: “We are thrilled by the successful integration with Stropro that further enhances our users’ experience by the ability to track alternative investments arranged by Stropro.

“Existing clients with alternative exposure, like structured investments, are currently adding these positions manually. This will now happen automatically for anyone trading through Stropro thanks to this partnership.

“This new partnership also enriches the experience for advisers accessing alternatives for their clients,” Mr Morris said.

Will Lawson, Senior Financial Adviser of Wentworth Securities, noted: “The Stropro-Sharesight integration is a fantastic initiative for clients, advisers and accountants alike. I’ve been thrilled with the Stropro platform and the product offering, but to have these transactions elegantly reported in Sharesight provides me with the whole-of-wealth visibility I need to service and advise my clients.”

Ben Streater, Chief Product Officer at Stropro, added: “Investors are increasingly seeking out alternatives to achieve their desired portfolio outcomes.

“Sophisticated investors often use a range of platforms and providers to access best in class offerings.  Sharesight is a powerful tool to consolidate investment holdings. Stropro clients can access best of breed global alternatives via Stropro and benefit from consolidated wealth reporting via Sharesight.

“The integration will automate this process to enrich the experience for wholesale investors and advisers,” Mr Streater said.

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Doug Morris & Adam Smith

Saxo Markets, the multi-asset trading and investing specialist, and Sharesight, a portfolio tracking and tax reporting service provider, have announced a new partnership to deliver an integrated recordkeeping service for self-directed investors.

The Open Banking-like initiative, integrated through an open API, will allow Saxo clients in Australia to create share trading summary reports with one click.

Through the joint solution, investors will be able to easily obtain personalised reports for both performance tracking and tax reporting purposes, including capital gains tax reports and dividend income reports, as well as benchmarking insights to track against the market.

Saxo Markets CEO, Adam Smith said: “Our integration with Sharesight is a natural fit as both of our companies are committed to providing self-directed investors with tools that are often only available to professional investors.”

“This integration also makes tax reporting easier for our clients, providing a seamless solution to reduce the ongoing burden of tax administration.”

Conversely, the integration with Saxo will expose Sharesight clients to a platform provider offering access to 36 international exchanges and over 40,000 instruments across all asset classes.

Sharesight CEO, Doug Morris, said: “Sharesight clients have tended to have a high portfolio weighting to Aussie shares and are not that exposed to global investing opportunities. Given this local bias, we see our alliance with a Saxo as highly beneficial for our clients.”

An investor trading with Saxo will be able to grant their accountant access to trading records via their Sharesight account thereby streamlining much of the manual work that goes into tax reporting.

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​Chris Ridd (Left) ​with Doug Morris.

Leading wealth portal myprosperity has announced a partnership with premier share portfolio tracker, Sharesight. Clients who use Sharesight to track their investments will now be able to view them from within their myprosperity wealth portal.

The direct integration of Sharesight portfolio data within myprosperity is the latest milestone in the company’s ambitious journey to create a comprehensive shared data platform for accountants, advisers, and consumers.

Chris Ridd, CEO of myprosperity, said “Sharesight tracks over AUD $10Bn worth of investments and are one of the leading share portfolio trackers in Australia. myprosperity clients have more than $80M in shares which they’ve entered into their wealth portals. This partnership with Sharesight is another step towards giving Australians a full view of their wealth portfolio and empowering their accountants and advisers to provide insightful advice powered by live data.”

myprosperity’s white-label, personal wealth portal provides a consolidated, real-time view of a client’s entire financial world, thanks to live integrations with leading financial services providers. Available on desktop and via mobile app, accountants and financial planners grant access to their clients on a subscription basis.

Doug Morris, CEO of Sharesight, added “We are excited by this partnership with myprosperity. Financial professionals are seeking line of sight across their clients’ investment portfolios and this integration showcases the technical capabilities of our API. Marketplace as a concept – to integrate the best services for the best in class functionality – will lay the foundations of open banking and act as an example of what the future could look like. We welcome myprosperity’s clients onto the Sharesightplatform.”

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Brendan Malone

Fintech companies are moving in on traditional financial services providers as their products and services gain popularity, grabbing market share and talent while forcing down costs.

Traditional jobs may be lost and even one of the big four banks could disappear, according to a panel of the nation’s leading fintech entrepreneurs speaking today at the Fintech CEOs on the Future of Finance seminar, being hosted by OnMarket BookBuilds.

Panellist Ben Bucknell, chief executive officer of OnMarket BookBuilds, an Australian fintech behind OnMarket, an innovative online portal giving retail investors direct access to IPOs, says fintech is reshaping the investment industry and opening up career opportunities for today’s university students.
“Investment opportunities that were only previously available to the very wealthy just five years ago are increasingly available to everyone though financial technology. There’s never been an easier time to transform a good idea into a business plan. That creativity is very attractive to young people. We’re aiming to draw them to fintech before they get trapped in a middle-office role preparing PowerPoint presentations just to feed an outsized mortgage,” Bucknell will tell the seminar, being hosted by OnMarket with the University of New South Wales’ University Network for Investing and Trading (UNIT).

Fellow panelist, Jost Stollmann chief executive officer of Tyro Payments, said the bank of the future will be a technology company with a banking licence. Tyro calls it the ‘Nextgen Bank’ and is building such a business. He predicts one of the big four banks will disappear with the fintech onslaught.

“According to a recent Frost & Sullivan study, Fintech in Australia – Trends, Forecasts and Analysis 2015 – 2020, the Australian fintech sector is set to take $10 billion in aggregated revenues away from the big Australian banks and contribute $3 billion of new revenue to the Australian financial services sector from 2015 to 2020. This train is coming fast. Can an old-style bank respond and stay competitive? Maybe. Can all of them? Probably not. Just think: one of the big four banks could disappear in the next 20 years. The only question is, which one will it be? Unless the banks can unbundle their products, overcome their legacy infrastructure and compete with low-cost ‘provider agnostic’ digital platforms, they might well cease to exist,” Stollmann said.

“Australia cannot afford to be complacent. More and more of this country’s best and brightest minds are leaving the big banks in order to start their own business and reinvent banking. The government, regulators, and the wider community should encourage and enable these entrepreneurs and their efforts. We are well-placed as a country to lead ‘Nextgen’ banking and it will take courage and commitment to get us there.

Fellow panellist Brendan Malone, chief operating officer of Acorns Australia, which has released an app that automatically invests a person’s spare change, says disruptive business models will survive and thrive, forcing down costs for customers while taking some business away from the banks. “Fintech companies will not only be able to capture bank customers, but drive down fees across the industry – in a similar way online stockbrokers did at the beginning of the century across the whole stockbroking industry,” he says. “However, a big challenge for fintech start-ups is winning the confidence of customers; winning confidence about providing a seamless and reliable service to our customers. People automatically have that confidence in the banks, but as a fintech, we’ve had to earn the trust of our customers.”

Another panellist, Doug Morris, chief executive of Sharesight, a leading online share portfolio management software business, agrees costs will be forced down, but only gradually. Traditional financial services jobs too will be lost.

“Technology companies can truly provide lower cost and better solutions, but the overall impact on finance won’t be a massive upheaval of the banking system overnight. Instead, you’ll see a constellation of apps that will have more of a slow burn effect. Remember that it takes wilful and passionate consumers to truly change an industry.”

Like OnMarket’s Bucknell, Morris says the fintech industry is drawing talent away from the banks and other incumbents. “It’s clear that there are fewer qualified candidates joining investment banks, for example, and they are going to tech companies instead. Moreover, traditional financial services distribution and marketing jobs are under threat. I’d encourage [university graduates] to gain experience in analytical, data-driven, marketing if possible. This skill set permeates most fintechs,” says Morris.

Georgia King-Siem, a senior manager with KPMG, says the disruption caused by fintech will continue as financial services become automated and commoditised – but only fintech businesses that truly innovate will stand out and win market share.

“Understanding and embracing innovation and the disruption it brings is necessary for survival – we must evolve or face extinction. On the flip side, those that innovate effectively will have a greater opportunity to increase profitability, productivity and develop a sustainable competitive advantage,” she says.

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