[The Wrap] Bouquets and brickbats in a big week; A challenge for advisers too

In true Wrap style this is a wrap of the past week and it has been a big one. Philip Macalister hands brickbats and bouquets and offers up a challenge to advisers.

Friday, April 4th 2025, 5:02PM

The week started off with CoFI coming to life. Did it change anyone's day on Monday?

Nope, I don't think so. But as I note here there will be changes coming down the pipeline.

The Financial Advice NZ conference on Christchurch was a success - but here's a challenge for the sector. According to the FMA there are just over 8,000 financial advisers and, in good news, we have just seen a bunch of newbies join the advice profession.

But only 500 people turned up and the conference. When you strip out product providers, media, speakers etc it's only a couple of hundred advisers.

Financial advisers have to do better than that. FANZ put on a good event with quality speakers, a great venue and overall a well-organised event.

If we are ambitious about professionalism and growing advice numbers need to be better than that.

Congratulations to the winners in the Excellence Awards. A fine crop of great individuals. Naomi Ballantyne is a deserved winner of the top award (and I did wonder to myself why she hadn't been awarded it before).

One shout out I wanted to make is to Lifetime and its Dreams Day programme. I have seen videos of this at its conference and it's a great initiative. My shout out is to Greg Munt who founded the programme when he had One 50 Group which was subsequently acquired by Lifetime. Credit to him as founder and Lifetime for embracing the programme.

If that was a bouquet then the brickbat is to the Commerce Commission for its clumsy handling of its proposal that mortgage advisers need to present clients with three offers.

Its recommendation is qualified starting with the words "where possible," then goes on to say "advisers should present at least three actual offers to their clients."

It's very poor messaging and no surprise the recommendation (which frankly is stupid) has been so controversial.

The other development which caught my eye is the massive personnel changes at life insurance companies. Fidelity and nib have made announcements, but there are also changes at AIA (which they won't confirm yet).

The issue worth highlighting here is that companies are getting rid of staff who have deep institutional knowledge and relationship with advisers. It's the sort of knowledge and trust which has been built up over time and cannot easily be replicated and replaced.

This has been an ongoing trend for sometime.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Insurers rely on third party distribution (aka advisers); sure most now have bank channels too, but the real business comes from advisers. This is a relationship game. To be successful there has to be great relationships between the advisers and product providers.

Chucking out all the experience and relationships is not a recipe for success.

Tags: Opinion