AFA seeking to address ‘regulatory issues’ with new Minister Stephen Jones

The Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) has welcomed incoming financial services minister Stephen Jones who was sworn in this week.

In a new statement, the AFA said Mr Jones has developed a “sound understanding” of the challenges facing the sector and acknowledged his willingness to address these challenges.

CEO Phil Anderson said the association will be looking to address other “regulatory issues” with the minister.

“The AFA looks forward to working with Minister Jones to achieve policy settings that enable better outcomes for consumers and to enable Financial Advisers to thrive,” Mr Anderson said.

“The Quality of Advice Review presents a significant opportunity to achieve a quantum leap in the state of the market. There are other important financial advice regulatory issues that we will seek to address with the Minister and his team.”

Mr Jones has maintained in recent months that he will look to make some changes in the industry, particularly when it comes to compliance and education standards.

Speaking on a recent webinar hosted by Stockbrokers and Investment Advisers Association (SIAA), Mr Jones doubled down on his earlier commitment to fix the “hot mess” that is the advice industry by introducing an ‘experience pathway’.

“We want to put in place a sensible, efficient recognition of prior learning arrangement so that if you’ve been doing the job for 10 years, you can continue to be a licensed adviser provided you haven’t got any black marks,” Mr Jones said.

He assured that if appointed, Labor “should be able to” enact the experience pathway “pretty quickly”.

Earlier this year, joining Momentum Media on an exclusive podcast, Mr Jones criticised the government for “monumentally mishandling” regulatory changes across the financial services industry and vowed to do better if Labor is elected to government.

He gave a candid assessment of the financial services industry, labelling the poorly managed “tsunami of regulatory changes” as the main culprit for adviser exodus in Australia.

“There was a whole bunch of changes that were in play, there was a known timeline for it, not going back months or even years. Some of this stuff has been five, six years in the making, how a government could monumentally mishandle a bunch of this stuff is beyond belief, particularly a government that says it's a good economic manager."

Neil Griffiths

Neil is the Deputy Editor of the wealth titles, including ifa and InvestorDaily.

Neil is also the host of the ifa show podcast.