Chant West will re-jig its super ratings methodology in line with the introduction of scaled advice.
Ian Fryer, head of research at Chant West, said it would be upping its allocation to member services from 15 to at least 20 per cent, with a spotlight on the fund's advice channel.
"We're looking at increasing our weighting to that because we think those issues have a greater potential to affect the members' final outcome even more than fees and investment philosophy," he said.
He said retirement calculators, segmenting communications and access to scaled advice would take higher prominence in their ratings methodology, as would the channel to full scale advice.
"When we look at member services we look at financial advice, and a focus of that is scaled advice – but we're also looking at, 'does the fund provide access to other advisers?' so that they can get full advice as well," he said.
The importance of the advice channel was being realised not only by the Government and the regulators but by retail funds that had switched their focus from adviser engagement to member engagement over the past five years, Fryer said.
But SuperRatings and Morningstar said the changes had little bearing on their ratings methodology.
Morningstar said its focus was on the fund manager and the underlying investment performance.
Heron said it was considering scaled advice in its ratings methodology, but placed only a very minimal weighting to advice – 5 per cent of the 15 per cent of the overall allocation.
