Eleanor Dartnall

The Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) has introduced new categories in its community awards, recognising three levels of exceptional service to the association.

The three categories include the existing AFA Appreciation Awards, plus the new AFA Recognition Awards and the AFA Thought Leader Award.

AFA Appreciation Awards were extended to:

• Karen Walmsley, Powe Financial Advice
• Amanda Cassar, Wealth Planning Partners
• Jawad Ahmed, Mackenzie Strategic Wealth

AFA Recognition Awards were extended to:

• Mark Stubbings, Sunsuper
• Niall McConville, TAL Life
• Olivia Sarah-Le Lacheur, CommInsure

AFA Thought Leader Award

The AFA awarded the inaugural AFA Thought Leader Award, which represents the pinnacle of the community awards, to Eleanor Dartnall, Focus Wealth Advisers.

AFA CEO, Philip Kewin said, “The AFA community awards are extended to people within our community who demonstrate ongoing and outstanding commitment to the advice profession. It is our way of saying thank-you to those people who believe in and are passionate about our cause, which is delivering great advice to more Australians.”

The Awards were presented at the AFA National Adviser Conference on the Gold Coast last night.

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Sue Viskovic

The Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) and TAL have announced the semi-finalists in the 2016 AFA Female Excellence in Advice Award (the Award).

Developed in 2011 as a joint initiative by the AFA and TAL, the Award recognises and showcases the talents and contributions of women in financial advice to their clients, community and profession. The Award criteria includes assessment of the candidates’ contributions to financial literacy in the community and/or campaigns targeted specifically at helping female clients take control of their financial lives.

AFA CEO, Brad Fox, said the Award is a reflection of the AFA’s commitment to continue to generate and encourage positive change in the financial advice sector, with women constantly being encouraged to enter the advice profession.

“The AFA is immensely proud of this Award, the calibre of entrants it attracts, and ultimately the finalists and in particular the winner. Our profession is going through significant change, and to see more women advisers coming through providing great advice to Australians is very important from a diversity perspective.”

General Manager of Retail Distribution at TAL, Niall McConville said the calibre and standard of applicants this year is exceptionally high and a demonstration of the ever increasing professionalism of the industry.

“It is encouraging to see the number of women prepared to be viewed as practitioner leaders, this is something that has been missing in the industry.  It is great for the profession but more importantly, it will hopefully encourage more women to come into the industry as both advisers and clients,” Mr McConville said.

This year’s Award prize has increased to a $15,000 TAL education package which the winner can customise for their education interests, aspirations and requirements.

This year’s judging panel consists of Brad Fox (CEO AFA), Niall McConville (GM, Retail Distribution TAL), Sue Viskovic (Managing Director, Elixir Consulting), Eleanor Dartnall (Principal Dartnall Advisers, Finalist FEIA 2013, AFA Adviser of the Year 2014) and Dianne Charman (Director Jade Financial, 2012 & 2013 FEIA Finalist, AFA Queensland State Director).

The finalists for the AFA Female Excellence in Advice Award will be announced late August 2016, with the winner announced at the AFA National Adviser Conference in Canberra from 5-7 October.

The Award semi-finalists are:

• Amanda Cassar, Director & Financial Adviser, Wealth Planning Partners
• Cathy Lowder, Principal & Financial Adviser, Fryer Financial Services
• Fran Hughes, Senior Wealth Advisor, Insight Financial Partners
• Karen Vickers, CEO & Wealth Advisor, ARC Wealth Pty Ltd
• Lea Schodel, Financial Adviser, MHP Private Wealth
• Nicole Heales, Financial Adviser & Mortgage Broker, Nicole Heales Financial
• Patricia Peters, Director & Certified Financial Planner, Peters McKeown
• Peita Diamantidis, Co-Founder & Financial Adviser, Caboodle Financial Services
• Susan Rallings, Senior Vice President, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management
• Tracy Dyer, Senior Financial Adviser, Anne Street Partner
• Tracey Edwards,Director & Senior Adviser, First Advice Solutions

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Eleanor Dartnall

The AFA Adviser of the Year supported by Zurich

With nominations for this year’s Association of Financial Adviser (AFA) Adviser of the Year Award (the Award) now open, 2014 winner Eleanor Dartnall has shared some of the secrets of her success.

Ms Dartnall believes her approach to client financial literacy is her point of difference. “What we try very hard to do is discover the level of financial literacy of each and every client and then provide appropriate coaching and further education so that they better understand the language of investing and the opportunities available to them,” she said. “We have found that our clients really appreciate this, which means we get a lot of referrals. So our approach is really good for our clients and it is really good for our business.”

Ms Dartnall applies her approach to financial literacy to her business model. While many advisers segment clients based on their monetary value or investment worth, Ms Dartnall segments according to the client’s financial literacy.

“I understood right from the start that each client brings to the table everything they have worked for. As advisers, we need to bring our knowledge to the table and we need to share it. The client needs to own all the decisions made and they can’t do this if they don’t understand the advice or the long-term outcomes of implementing the advice,” she said.

Now in its 13th year, the AFA Adviser of the Year Award seeks to recognise an individual who is excelling in the provision of life-changing financial advice.

On launching the Award and its companion, the AFA/Zurich Practice of the Year Award last month, AFA CEO Brad Fox said the awards celebrate the success of exceptional advisers whose performance has been highly rated by their clients.

“At a time when the reputation of financial advisers in the community is being challenged, these Awards provide an important opportunity to put the spotlight on the fantastic outcomes available to clients through receiving quality financial advice,” he said at the time.

Mr Fox also said that, “Importantly, advisers can nominate themselves, or may be nominated by their peers, their licensee or PDM/BDM which is a generous display of support for the nominee.”

Mr Philip Kewin, Zurich’s GM Retail Life & Investments reinforced that the criteria for the awards would continue to include assessment of efforts made by award candidates to improve the financial literacy of their clients, prospects, and the community overall.

“Notwithstanding the challenges faced by the advice profession, the important role played by advisers in creating a more financially informed community has never been in question,” he said when nominations for the awards opened last month. “To the extent that many advisers are continuously looking to improve both their business efficiency and their client engagement proposition, both awards play a pivotal role in shining a light on, and sharing, best practice insights.”

Applications for both awards are currently open and close 17 July 2015 with the winners announced at the AFA National Adviser Conference, in Cairns on 27 October.

More information, including application forms, can be found at www.adviseroftheyear.com.au

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Eleanor Dartnall

With a trademark ‘can-do’ approach, a leading Australian financial planner and advocate for client centric professional advice has revealed some of her winning business ways, forged by investing greater time in her clients’ education and financial literacy.

Eleanor Dartnall is the 2014 AFA Adviser of the Year* and principal of a growing financial planning practice based in the Southern Highlands, NSW. Her practice was founded on the core principle of “informed client consent.”

Against the orthodoxy of a profession that predominantly segments clients based on monetary value or investment worth, Ms. Dartnall segments her clients individually, based on their practical financial knowledge. That level of knowledge dictates dictates what knowledge gaps she need to fill, via an array of self-developed tools including flipcharts and glossaries.

She does not charge for this time, and as she explained at a recent adviser roadshow, believes that time spent educating clients is “never a burdensome cost, but rather an investment in her clients”.

Ms. Dartnall says her new clients generally fall into three basic client ‘types’: learners, self-directed and delegators. But regardless of sophistication, each new client experiences the same Dartnall-created approach, beginning with a one hour initial meeting and the presentation of a blank 128 page journal.

“The journal represents the beginning of self-responsibility for the client. It is in here that a client makes notes, jots ideas, drafts questions – it is a living and engaging record of their growing understanding of the advice process, and the rationale for the portfolio or strategy we may construct together.

“When I ask a client to sign off on a statement of advice I want them to completely understand exactly what they are signing off on,” she said.

The Dartnall “informed consent” segmentation model represents a unique approach when measured against similar financial advice practices. Recent research** conducted by Zurich, shows that a majority of advisers (75 per cent) currently segment their clients based on their monetary value (a combination of fees paid, assets under management, net worth or income level).

Less than five per cent segment clients by their financial literacy.

A majority (80 per cent) said they managed their client segmentation with online tools (CRM or in-house software).

When asked about the impact of their preferred segmentation approach on their business, the poll revealed one third (32.9 per cent) said it had zero impact or they were unsure of its impact.

40 per cent said it improved profitability, whilst 38 per cent recorded increased customer satisfaction levels.

Ms. Dartnall’s emphasis on informed consent and education – in conjunction with an overhaul of her client review process – has seen her client referral rate improve from 2 per cent to 88 per cent, and her overall client retention rate improve to 100 per cent.

————

*Zurich Australia is the foundation partner of the AFA Adviser of the Year award

**Online survey of 213 advisers conducted on behalf of Zurich by Beaton Research and Consulting, March 2015

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Ben Nash

XY Adviser, a community of Gen X and Y advisers, is disrupting the current discussion around the future of financial advice by providing a forum for innovation and thought leadership that connects young, like-minded individuals and encourages them to share knowledge and ideas that exceed the results of traditional advice practices.

XY adviser was designed to push industry discussion to a new level by encouraging individual advisers to implement the ideas gained from collaboration with the industry’s best and most innovative influencers, within their own practices.

Ben Nash, adviser at Successful Ways and co-founder of XY Adviser, says now is the time to focus on elevating the discussion of financial advice above industry issues, to the sharing of advice business models that provide value to clients, and which reflect the results of outcomes based advice.

“We hear it all the time, Gen X and Gen Y are the future of advice, so we have decided to build a network to allow those who, like us, want to initiate change, to contribute to the discussion. We are working towards professionalism from the grass roots,” he says. “We are all responsible for the transition of financial advice into a profession. We think it will require everyone to work together in sharing experiences and ideas to make that work, and to also set an example so we are attracting the best of the best into our profession.”

Eleanor Dartnall, the current Association of Financial Advisers Adviser of the Year, will be the guest speaker at the first XY Adviser event this year.

“We are really excited to have Eleanor as a speaker at our first event, especially due to her specific focus on the education process she undertakes with her clients. Eleanor provides innovative, cutting-edge and really personalised advice for her clients, something that aligns with the future of advice as we see it,” Mr Nash says.

Since its inception in 2014, the XY Adviser LinkedIn group now has over 200 members, something the group hopes to increase organically as more advisers hear about the community and feel like their values and vision align.

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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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Eleanor Dartnall

The Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) and Zurich have named the winners of Australia’s most prestigious advice accolades, the 2014 AFA Adviser of the Year Award and the new AFA Practice of the Year Award.

The 2014 AFA Adviser of the Year Award has been presented to Eleanor Dartnall from Dartnall Advisers Pty Ltd. The AFA Practice of the Year Award has been presented to Complete Financial Balance.

Speaking at the Gala Dinner at the AFA National Adviser Conference in Cairns tonight, AFA CEO, Brad Fox said the AFA is delighted to announce Eleanor Dartnall and Complete Financial Balance as the recipients of the respective Awards. “Eleanor has an incredible passion to make a positive difference in the lives of her clients and, in recent times, to the young adult children of her clients. She is extremely committed to ongoing personal professional development, engaging in extensive research at Masters level,” he said. “Every client is developed in terms of their own level of financial literacy and Eleanor’s advice strategies are built through collaboration with the client which guarantees the client’s emotional commitment to the advice outcome. With Eleanor as an ambassador for advice as the AFA Adviser of the Year, we believe she will make a very positive impact on the public perception of financial advice.”

In congratulating Complete Financial Balance, Mr Fox said, “As the first recipient of this prestigious award, the team at Complete Financial Balance have proven that by continually improving and consistently looking to make their practice better for their clients, true excellence can be achieved. Their client-focussed processes demonstrate their value to the client at every step of the advice journey.  As the first recipients of the Award, Complete Financial Balance has set a very high benchmark.”

Philip Kewin, GM Retail Life & Investments from award partner Zurich said, “These advisers are the vanguards of their profession and as such will provide crucial leadership during challenging times and will play a pivotal role in creating a more informed, more financially literate community.Zurich is delighted this award program continues to deliver finalists and winners of such high calibre.”

Mr Fox commented on the rigour of the judging process for each award. “With the support of Zurich since 2003 for the Adviser of the Year Award, and now also with the Practice of the Year, we have built the most stringent assessment process applied to any advice award in Australia. Some of the steps include an in-depth client feedback survey, site visit, examination of advice documents, interviews with staff, and a final presentation in front of a highly credentialed judging panel of seven members. That’s why these are the most prestigious adviser awards in the country,” he said. “We make the process like this so that we know we have role models for other advisers and to demonstrate the quality of AFA advisers to the broader community.”

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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

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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?

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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.

Philip Kewin

The Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) and Zurich have named the Grand Finalists in the prestigious 2014 AFA Adviser of the Year Award and in its newest award – AFA Practice of the Year.

First awarded in 2003, and supported by Zurich since inception, the AFA Adviser of the Year honour is acknowledged as Australia’s premier advice award. This year heralds a new chapter in the Awards, with the best advice practice to be honoured separately.

AFA CEO, Brad Fox, said the grand finalists for both Awards have been selected after undergoing an intensive 360-degree assessment process with judges recognising education, experience, leadership within the profession, advocacy and innovation. An extensive client survey is part of the judging process as well as a practice visit from one of the judges, and then a final full-day judging showcase.

“As an Association, we are incredibly proud of the financial advisers that have entered the awards. The calibre of grand finalists proves that as a profession, we have a lot to celebrate. Each year, through the rigorous judging process, we get an important reminder that quality advice is still the norm in Australia, and that the very best are world class. Financial advice is first and foremost a service business and our grand finalists are incredible exponents of this.”

The AFA Adviser of the Year Award criteria includes elements such as client service, technical excellence, robustness of advice process, personal adviser qualities, industry contribution and commitment to improving financial literacy. The AFA Practice of the Year Award recognizes the practice’s use of technology, quality of client engagement materials, quality of the client feedback process and also commitment to improved financial literacy of clients and the wider community.

“The Awards represent an opportunity to not only celebrate the professional excellence of the grand finalists, but to also acknowledge the high quality nominations that were made from a significant number of other advisers and practices, all dedicated to improving the lives of their clients,” Mr Fox said. “There is no doubt that the AFA’s ambition of achieving great advice for more Australians is in good hands.”

Mr Philip Kewin, Zurich’s GM Retail Life & Investments noted that, despite the diversity of business models used by this year’s finalists, they all deliver a consistently exceptional customer experience.

“As the premier advice awards, our finalists have always been the vanguards and pioneers of the advice profession,” Mr Kewin said.

“This glimpse into the future of advice and advice practices reveals much diversity and innovation in the ways advice is being made more accessible, and the overriding focus on delivering an exceptional customer experience augurs well for the profession and the community overall,” he said.

The 2014 AFA Adviser of the Year and Practice of the Year will be announced with the support of Zurich at a Gala Dinner on Tuesday, 14 October 2014 at the AFA National Adviser Conference in Cairns.

The grand finalists are:

Adviser of the Year

• Catherine Robson, Affinity Private
• Eleanor Dartnall, Dartnall Advisers Pty Ltd
• PJ Byrne, Mr Insurance

Practice of the Year

• Complete Financial Balance
• Rising Tide Financial Services
• Robina Financial Solutions Pty Ltd

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