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Focus on funds
The role of financial advice in superannuation will be a key talking point at this year’s Conference of Major Superannuation Funds (CMSF), with both the Financial Planning Association (FPA) and the Investment andFinancial Services Association (IFSA) having agreed to state their cases.
Despite ongoing differences between industry superannuation funds and the financial planning community, both the chief executive of the FPA, Jo-Anne Bloch, and her IFSA counterpart, Richard Gilbert, will address one of the final plenary sessions of the conference.
The presence of Bloch at the conference represents a return engagement in circumstances where the executive chair of the Industry Funds Network, Garry Weaven, addressed last year’s FPA national conference in Melbourne.
Significantly, Weaven found himself the subject of some tough responses from financial planner delegates attending the FPA conference.
According to the CMSF program: “The issue of commissions is a contentious one within the superannuation industry. How we pay advisers is constantly under debate. Also causing difficulty for funds is the laws and regulations which prescribe how funds can communicate with members, which funds can give advice, and what can and cannot be said without tripping into dangerous territory.”
The background to the long-running debate over the role of advice in superannuation, combined with the IFSA and FPA submissions to the current Parliamentary inquiry into superannuation, will make the plenary session particularly interesting.
The FPA’s Bloch has gone on record as stating that the so-called ‘compare the pair’ advertising campaign launched by industry superannuation funds has served to undermine the value of financial advice.
For his part, Gilbert is expected to utilise recent research undertaken by IFSA, which revealed investors were broadly happy with the quality of financial advice they were receiving.
Gilbert said the research had revealed that, in total, 94 per cent of those currently seeing a financial planner had indicated they were satisfied with the experience.
He said this satisfaction level increased for those with an active relationship with their financial planner, but dropped to 88 per cent for those who were seeing their planners less frequently.
The debate over the role of financial planning in superannuation will come just a few months after a senior executive attached to the so-called super fund’s bank, Members Equity, warned about the growing involvement of financial planners in reverse mortgages, particularly their capacity to leverage high commissions.
AUTHOR
Mike Taylor
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