Often there is confusion on the roles of accountants and financial advisors and there are grey areas… Basically accountants cannot give you financial advice unless they are also a financial services business; I cannot advise you where to invest your money.
I know the team that set up XY Advisers and I attended their inaugural function and I was impressed at the function to hear advisors with such focus on their client’s education and engagement in financial investments! Your life savings in or outside Super deserve your understanding and these advisors can make sure of that.
Here is what Clayton Daniel from XY told me about them:
XY Adviser is all about trying to get momentum in Australia to improve advice, which is the only way it can truly become a profession, by helping to improve advisers. We aren’t an industry association – they represent advisers and defend their interests, we aim to improve advice – and this may cause some growing pains for older styles of adviser businesses. We aren’t here to keep things they way they are.
We aren’t about independence/aligned, commissions or not and every other thing that dominates headlines, we ask the question ‘what brings the most value to clients, and how do we give advisers access to that information’. It’s about growing bigger than FOFA and legislation. We want to be on the forefront of improving advice. We don’t know what that will look like, and it’s not about complete agreement at this stage – but the conversation has now begun, and we are starting to be heard which is good.