Beacon announces mortgage broking arm

Speaking to ifa, Beacon Group chief executive Peter Daly – formerly chief executive of collapsed licensee AFS Group – announced the decision to move into a multi-service offering.

“Where a practice has capacity, we will take a practice from being full financial planning and then open them up into other areas,” Mr Daly said.

Connective – 25 per cent of which was acquired by Macquarie Bank earlier this week, as reported by ifa sister title The Adviser - differs from other aggregators in that it doesn’t “tie you down”, he said.

Beacon has also developed its own “sub-five per cent” mortgage product, which is designed to compete with the big four banks.

Along with mortgage broking, the dealer group is building a “hub and spoke” accounting service for its planners as part of an effort to encourage cross selling across Beacon practices.

“We will acquire two [accounting] practices to begin with,” Mr Daly said.

These practices will form the ‘hubs’ that have all of the accounting expertise in-house, while the ‘spokes’ will go out to the various financial planning practices within the dealer group.

“I’m encouraging practices to go out and buy their own accounting firms… and then turn them around,” he said.