‘The most disruptive we’ve ever seen’: Almost 8,000 advisers gone in two years

Addressing the AIOFP conference in Hobart yesterday, Forte Asset Solutions managing director Steve Prendeville said the years since the royal commission had been “the most disruptive we’ve ever seen” in terms of regulatory change and the exit of the previously dominant major institutions from advice.

“There have been seismic shifts as the banks went out, we had the Hayne report, but what happened through all this period of time is we went through this period of suspense where no one could really do anything [with their business],” Mr Prendeville said.

He added that over 4,000 advisers had left the industry in 2019, and more than 3,500 in 2020, for a total of 7,738 over the past two years.

Since January 2019, the number of advisers in the industry had shrunken 26 per cent, Mr Prendeville said.

“But this cohort was predominantly salaried bank advisers, accountants who couldn’t operate without exemptions, or it was the small end of businesses, sub-$200,000, maybe up to $400,000, that had significant amounts of grandfathered revenue and were unable to convert that,” he said.

“That leaves our industry at the moment with around 20,715 advisers. [The exodus] has slowed down in the last two quarters, but we expect that to elevate in the final two quarters of 2021 with the FASEA exam. There are only two sittings now and we have 48 per cent of our community who have not gone through that.”

At the same time as sub-scale practices or salaried advisers looked for the exits, those remaining in the industry moved increasingly to non-aligned dealer groups as institutional advice groups slimmed down or wound up.

Mr Prendeville said more than 6,100 advisers had switched licensees in the past two years, and that the shift to independence had led to better quality businesses among those that were remaining in the industry.

“We had adviser migrations coming out of the institutions and going to the independents. We’ve seen the iceberg of the institutions, which dominated 70 per cent of distribution, completely revert, so now we have 70 per cent independence,” he said.