According to Wealth Data analysis, licensee owners with 100 owners or more have an average of 1.71 authorised representatives (ARs) to corporate authorised representatives (CARs), which roughly correlates to advisers per practice.
“Be warned, when you take a closer look at the information and how it plays out, it can be a bit confusing. For example, a financial adviser does not need to be an AR. Typically, financial advisers who work for a licensee that is predominately salaried are not ARs,” said Wealth Data founder Colin Williams.
“Also, ARs do not have to be financial advisers. For example, they may be giving general advice and not personal advice. Having said that, most of the major licensees do have very similar numbers of financial advisers to ARs, except for licensees of salaried based advisers.”
The largest ratios are both part of AMP Group, as Charter leads the way with 2.75 ARs per CAR, while AMP Financial Planning has 2.62. Fortnum sits in third place with 2.23 ARs for each CAR.
There are quite a few licensees averaging less than 1.5 with Synchron at 1.17, while Capstone (1.31), Lifespan (1.39), and InterPrac (1.41) are among the notable large licensees with lower ratios.
“The lower ratios indicate that many advisers work in single adviser practices. This theme rings true even for ‘new’ AFSLs,” said Mr Williams.
“For example, since January 1 , 2020, 425 new licensees have commenced under the financial planning model and 164 of them are single advisers licensees and 106 with two advisers.”
Adviser movement this week
The week ending 26 October saw a small loss of one adviser, with the four new entrants not quite enough to offset the losses. There are currently 15,701 advisers in the industry.
A number of licensee owners saw multiple advisers join their ranks this week, led by the five added to Sequoia Group on the back a self-licensed AFSL, Poynter Hargraves Financial, moving to Sequoia subsidiary Interprac.
Highview Wealth Solutions added four advisers, with three coming from Akambo, while Castleguard Trust (Lifespan) was up three advisers, with two switching from Fortnum.
Diverger picked up two advisers at Paragem and the advisers after they switched from Fitzpatricks, while two new licensees began with two advisers each.
Centrepoint Group, Australian Retirement Trust, and AIA were among 20 licensee owners to add one adviser each.
The previously mentioned Poynter Hargraves Financial led the losses for the week, down by six. Capstone was down five advisers, while Insignia lost another four, and Telstra Super lost three.
Fiducian, Steinhardt Holdings (Infocus) and UniSuper were among the 20 licensee owners that were down one adviser each.
No surprise really. The larger licensees have been fairly proactive in trying to consolidate smaller practices into larger ones, as a way to lower the licensee’s supervisory costs and compliance risks. Medium sized licensees are less inclined to do it because practices being pushed to merge are more likely to leave altogether. But large licensees don’t care about losing a few small practices, and in many cases they have onerous contracts and/or weaponised compliance to ensure they get their way.