Efed – there are several inaccuracies in your post. I was a financial planner for 20 years, both employed and self-employed, under various licensees. I don’t think it is the least bit appropriate to label all financial planners in the manner you have. Firstly, your assumption that all AMP aligned financial planners were “flogging AMP product” is incorrect. It was not the CBA or ANZ, we had a wide approved product list. In my time as a planner under AMP (7 years), I rarely chose AMP products. The insurances were very poor price and feature wise in comparison to others and the super products (apart from the North platform) archaic. Even if using the North platform, there were over 400 fund managers to choose from. I rarely used any AMP funds because their performance wasn’t good in comparison to others. I resent your assumption that Advisers didn’t take their client’s best interests into account. That is not my experience of the planners I have known in all the Licensees I was part of. There is plenty of recourse for clients who feel they were given poor advice, and planners are highly regulated and audited. The business partnership with AMP was not a “bad investment”, the businesses were not failing, and the advisers were not dodgy or non-compliant, AMP decided to terminate firms that didn’t charge enough fees to enrich AMP. This was a change of their policy, not poor practices in the planning businesses. Firms that preferred to keep fees reasonable for their mum and dad investors even though the cost of running a planning business rose every year with the addition of more and more compliance cost, paperwork etc. are the ones you have you sympathy for. AMP broke legal contracts, so all the due diligence in the world wouldn’t have changed that unforeseen event. On top of the contract breach (subject to a class action) there were a lot of other very underhanded/fraudulent practices used by AMP to steal the businesses for a fraction of their value, before on-selling them for a nice profit. I left financial planning, as I came to the conclusion that I could make more money in a different field with a lot less overheads and BS. Financial planners are not just “glorified sales reps”, they are so much more. And they are not, on the whole, overly well remunerated for it. Planners do a lot of pro bono work because most of them joined that profession to help people. Why don’t you stop being so judgemental and speak to some clients who would have been in very bad situations without being properly insured, had savings in the bank etc. You obviously don’t understand the business very well, or what was done to these business owners. If you won’t waste your time reading the content of the website you criticise then why comment when you’re not fully informed? These were not even franchisees, as you state. The firms were Licensed through AMP (eg paid them a fee for ongoing training, which AMP was often negligent in, and compliance audits) but self-owned. It is very clear that you do not understand this industry very well, as you state. If you think these planners are ‘whining like babies’ after what they have been through, I would ask you to question your own powers of empathy. Maybe you work for a big, greedy corporate so think it’s OK for them to smash good, hard working, honest small business owners.
(20min delay)