It has been a big week in financial planning circles with IOOF and MLC reaching an agreement for IOOF to purchase the bulk of the MLC business and provide a home for the majority of the MLC Advisers. MLC have wasted no time and have transferred 156 Advisers from the National Australia Bank (NAB) Licensee to MLC Advice which operates under the GWM Licensee. A spokesperson for NAB stated that this is ‘Part of the ongoing process to seperate MLC from NAB’ and the Advisers will remain as salaried.

The IOOF / MLC deal will be closely followed and it will be interesting to see how many current Advisers associated with MLC that will switch to IOOF and how many will seek an alternate licensee.

Back to the week that was, there was a net loss of -16 Adviser roles. Quarter to date is virtually flat. After some big losses at the end of June many Advisers have been reappointed. For example, VICSuper as a result of the merger with First State Super (now known as Aware Financial Services), 57 VICSuper Advisers were removed from the register on June 30th and during the course of July and August, 26 have been appointed at Aware Financial Services.

Year to date, GWM (MLC Advice) now look like the leading licensee with a net gain of 97 Adviser roles. However, this is all down to the transfer of Advisers from NAB. Excluding the NAB transfer, GWM would be showing a net loss of -59. MLC as a group, combined with NAB and JBWere are down -193. Of interest, IOOF as a group are down -113 Adviser roles.

There has been quite a bit of talk this week in the mainstream media and social media as to the actual number of Advisers and how this may compare to previous years. You can via the dashboards take a ‘look back’ on Adviser numbers. For example, Dashboard 3 allows you to go back several years and if you go back six years, the numbers are very similar. Dashboard 6 also allows you to view licensees against the industry as a whole going back three years.

The financial planning industry is evolving into a profession and is looking very different now with more change on the way. Some critical changes that have affected the numbers was a rush of Advisers from accounting through 2016/17 and another rush of new Advisers in 2018 to get onto the Financial Adviser register. Dashboard 11 clearly shows this data which highlights the year current Advisers commenced as an Adviser. We are now seeing the banks exiting Advice which has been the major contributor to the losses since 2019. No doubt FASEA will now impact further growth.

The link below will take you to the dashboards