CBA-aligned practice jumps ship

Brisbane financial advice firm Ethical Financial Advice left Financial Wisdom in recent weeks and is currently operating under Shartru’s AFSL as an authorised representative.

Having launched in November 2012 as the retail advice arm of boutique fundie Shartru Capital, Shartru Wealth is experiencing considerable “traction” among disgruntled institutionally-aligned advisers and has even had to turn a number of potential recruits away, chief executive Rob Coyte told ifa.

Mr Coyte said that Ethical Financial Advice’s director, Adam Kennedy, was attracted to the dealer group’s “non-conflicted” nature and advice provision philosophy.

“I am an adviser first and foremost myself and we have built the dealer group around the idea of ‘by advisers for advisers’ that want to operate in a certain way,” Mr Coyte said.

“We are not bureaucrats or corporate guys. It’s about finding like-minded advisers to achieve some scale”.

As a former institutionally-aligned financial adviser himself, Mr Coyte said he has personal experience of the downsides of larger dealer groups, particularly the sense that management of these groups “didn’t have my back” in the case of product or fund failure.

“It was obvious that the big licensees didn’t have the skills to deal with a mess,” he said. “The most important thing you want from your licensee is keeping you on track and making sure you’re not doing the wrong thing.

“It’s not the warm or fuzzy stuff, it’s the compliance and the security that the products on the APL are thoroughly researched by independent non-conflicted sources.”

Mr Kennedy has since taken on a compliance management role within the Shartru network, as well as remaining at the helm of Ethical Financial.

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