30th Jan AMA: I'm Phil Anderson, GM Policy, Advocacy & Standards at FAAA, Ask Me Anything!

Hi Jessica, and thanks for your question. The honest answer is that fee consent is a bit of a mess at the moment. The Minister had the power to mandate a fee consent form, however he has not used that power at this stage. Treasury did not prioritise this issue and consultation on the design of a form was delayed. In the meantime, product providers have built their own forms and very few of them meet the obligations that advisers face. Thus, advisers are faced with the need to get clients to sign their own forms and to sign other forms for the product provider(s). We have not come a long way forward with this. At least we have got rid of FDSs.

Ultimately, we would like to move away from forms and see the development of a technology based solution so that an adviser can send an electronic fee consent package to a client via an app on their phone, and the client can click a button to accept the fee arrangement, with all necessary approvals electronically sent to the product provider(s).