‘We're not here to serve everyone’: Adviser says QAR is ‘radical improvement’ on current landscape

Corey Wastle, the founder of independent financial advice business Verse Wealth, is “incredibly supportive” of the direction the Quality of Advice Review (QAR) has taken and believes that reviewer Michelle Levy is moving the needle from compliance-led to consumer-led advice.

Speaking to ifa on an upcoming podcast, Mr Wastle explained that Ms Levy’s perspective is “very pragmatic” and that in his opinion, she is treating financial advice as a profession rather than an industry.

“I think she is giving us a lot, if not all of what we’ve been saying we’ve wanted for a very long period of time — and I’m talking generalities here, people have different views. No proposals are going to be perfect by nature, but I think as a whole they are a radical improvement on what we have currently,” Mr Wastle said.

Reflecting on the current regulatory landscape, Mr Wastle said “it’s not working” for both the advisers and their clients.

“Even just speaking for ourselves I guess, we’ve got a good business, we’re growing at a good pace, we attract a lot of enquiries, 100 to 150 a month, people are reaching out and we have to turn so many people away. People that genuinely want advice, that want to pay your advice, and in short, the reality is that they might not have the resources, the income or the assets or the complexity or a combination of those to warrant our full financial planning service,” he said.

“So we need to respectfully redirect them and I think that’s a shame. And redirecting them is hard because it’s not necessarily a bunch of obvious places you can send them to, particularly younger people, or lower asset, lower-income type clients.”

Mr Wastle believes advice is currently reserved primarily for the wealthy or individuals on a clear trajectory to wealth.

“I think all of us collectively want advice to be more available. And that’s where Michelle is coming from,” Mr Wastle said.

He believes that professional advice firms like Verse need to acknowledge that “we’re not meant to be here to serve everyone”.

“Not everyone can afford to have a professional financial adviser in their life. I think we need to be able to offer advice in different ways, in lower-cost ways, in more innovative ways,” he said.

Ultimately, Mr Wastle is not opposed to super funds and banks re-entering advice, but believes the key lies in how that re-entry is managed.

“People talk about going back to the bad, old days, I started in what were the bad old days. I was at CBA at the tail end of their very well-documented bad period… And I just don’t think we can go back there. I think too much has changed. I think we have too many important professional pillars in place,” Mr Wastle said.

Addressing the adviser exodus, which has seen the industry count drop to below 16,000, Mr Wastle believes “the devil is in the detail”.

“I think a lot of those are people who don’t want to be in the future of advice. The future of advice is going to be different from the past. And I think that a lot of the advice industry has been trying to cling to the past, rather than try and lean into the future.

“I think if you don’t lean into the future, you’re going to lose out every time.”

To hear more from Mr Wastle tune into the podcast from Wednesday at 5pm.