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

Thanks ShwetaM1. Yes there is definitely a conflict of interest in financial institutions appointing QAs and providing advice on their products. Conflicts of interest exist everywhere. In some cases, they are impossible to accept, whilst in other cases they can be managed. Let’s hope that the supervision and surveillance of QAs, when they commence, and on an ongoing basis, will be sufficient to ensure that the worst of what has happened in the past can be avoided. I certainly hope so as our members do not want to suffer reputational damage as a result of mistakes made by QAs.

My view has always been that QAs would provide the type of advice that fully qualified advisers would not provide, in that it was simple advice and the potential fees meant that they were simply not attractive clients. In this way, we would be talking about completely different consumer segments. QAs might be a means of these people getting simple advice that could make a meaningful difference to them, that they would otherwise not be able to get.

You might notice that I am not using the term ‘Qualified Adviser’, but instead referring to them as QAs. We objected strongly when this term was floated in December 2023, and we received a commitment from the Minister before Christmas that another term would be found. He repeated that commitment in a recent podcast that he did with Professional Planner.