FAAA points to 8,700 renewals
The Financial Advice Association of Australia is claiming to have achieved the renewal of over 80% of its practitioner members, with more to come.
According to FAAA chief executive, Sarah Abood, 8,700 renewals have occurred.
“The end of the financial year is the first big milestone for membership. This year it was the critical date for windup of the AFA, and many of our members prefer to pay in the previous financial year in any case, for tax reasons.
“By 30 June 2023, over 8,700 members, including over 80 per cent of eligible practitioner members, had renewed across both organisations.
“That such a large percentage of advisers have transferred or renewed their membership is a real vote of confidence in the newly formed FAAA,” she says. “We are also seeing a number of reinstatement and new membership applications coming through.”
The FAAA shared some more detail on the numbers, with AFA heritage members numbering 2,489 at the start of the renewal process across all categories. In total, 1,563 had transferred to the FAAA as at the end of June, with 146 advising that they don’t plan to transfer. The remainder includes duplicate members, members who have started the process but not yet completed it, and members who haven’t responded yet.
The statement said that as the AFA has officially wound up as of 30 June, those AFA members who have not transferred are no longer a member of any professional body and will not be receiving any membership services.
“We hear every day from AFA members who need some help in completing the move to a new portal, and some others who have been on leave. We will continue the offer to transfer and retain the membership start date for AFA members, on a similar basis as FPA heritage members, with a reminder that a late fee applies for renewals after 15 July,” Abood said.
The FAAA also shared more detail on the numbers for FPA heritage members. There were 9,693 FPA members in total eligible to renew. 6,377 practitioners and another 761 non-practitioners have already renewed, for a total of 7,138. At the same time last year, only 6,876 FPA members had renewed, and 6,436 in the year before – so numbers are running well ahead of previous years.
Given the granularity of renewal statistics FAAA clearly has available, perhaps the trade press would care to ask:
@Anon,
You seem to have a particular axe to grind with those who had grandfathered CFP status.
Most actually sat for the required 8 subjects which was a minimum requirement, mainly set by Deakin University.
Since you seem to be a bit short on your knowledge of those with grandfathered status, many were required under DFP 8 to submit a written SOA on a situation/circumstances for a particular client set by Deakin University on how your advice would achieve that client’s goals.
The pass mark was 75 + and if you did not achieve that, you failed the subject even before sitting for a 3 hour written exam that was also set by Deakin U.
And by the way, this may have escaped you but over the past 20 plus years, CFP’s (including those who were grandfathered) have had to do 40 hours pa. of continuing education whilst many like you who think you know more than most, that were not CFP’s only had to do 30 hours p.a. of CE.
Before you starting knocking older highly experience advisers, you should get your facts right, because many have more than paid their dues.
At least the FAAA will soon be able to fill its ranks with the thousands of “Advisers” with no education, no qualifications, no experience, no skin in the game all working in a call center at AwareSuper, Hesta, Hostplus etc etc. “I’m an Adviser too, just like you” said the backpacker. “I’m a Hesta Retirement Specialist”. Seems like 20% of members realized paying $1,000 a year for that type of Advocacy & leadership is not a good idea.
But bit of a worry to think it was only 20% who thought it was a waste of money.
I am sure that i am not the only one that is giving the FAAA one year to prove their value.
One year ?? They have a red hot issue now to attend to with the adviser fees tripling
If it takes a year to sort that then we are in trouble
It is funny how we view these things. The AFA and the FPA led the campaign to get relief on the ASIC Funding Levy in 2020 and 2021. In August 2021, the former Government provided relief in the form of a freeze to the 2018/19 level of $1,114. As a result the advice profession saved $34m for each of the two years. Yes a total of $68m. In the absence of that relief, a Treasury paper on the review of the ASIC Funding levy, that was released last week, showed that the actual Financial Adviser Levy would have been $2,971 in 2020/21 and $3,021 in 2021/22. So we have experienced an underlying increase of 6.5%, which is more tolerable. I am not saying in any way that this is Okay, and we obviously need to fight this one hard, however the issue does look different when you take into account the benefit of the freeze that we had for the last two years. The FAAA have been calling for an extension of the freeze, which I am sure we would be very happy with. Let’s see how they go.
Bugger a freeze. Get rid of what is an entirely unfair and inequitable charge, for all of the obvious reasons. That should have been FAAAs starting point, not restoring the discount
To their credit they have come out against the terrible ASIC levy which in conjunction with the compensation scheme of last resort, the ALP is trying to use to close small advice businesses.
The AIOFP have been silent on this ; too busy planning their next conference I think.
The FPA/AFA merger had nothing to do with what’s best for members or their valued clients interests or our industry. It was all about their own self preservation – oddly the very things they were paid to protect us from ended up shooting themselves in the foot too with massive paying member losses as the industry was needlessly decimated to prepare the way by design for big super funds to take over advice by their ‘mates’ in govt and ‘industry groups’ etc. You know the mob with way deeper pockets than us and way lower costs which they’ll be able to collectively charge all members for….you know the very so called fee for no service thing we we’re accused of doing but will be ok for them! We all know the things they’re about to do for them which will see us trying to compete with monster super funds on a massively un-level playing field cost/bureaucracy wise etc!
Neither the FPA/AFA and now the FAAA has given a rats about practitioners/clients needs or concerns for years, probably ever, their true allegiances has always been with others, those with far greater influence and cheque books than we peasantry practitioners and our clients they are supposed to serve. They keep selling us out to govt’s/bureaucrats/institutional forces time and again to feather their own nests with barely a whimper from them!
We’re not sure whether to stick around to keep an eye on them (try & keep the mongrels honest) and retain our once coveted and hard worked for CFP status (another extorsion con job the FPA now FAAA use to control and own us – our post noms should be ours not theirs once earned btw de-linked from paid membership!) or simply pack up and get out of Dodge completely! For sure we’ll be joining the AIOFP either way who are truly focused solely on the best interests of advisers, the industry and our valued clients who’ve ben screwed over and over for years by the rest of the vipers including the FPA/AFA/FAAA! I hope many others will wake up to the FAAA and move to the AIOFP soon! The FAAA went woke a long time ago, and if they can’t be changed, then I hope they go broke soon!
Nice spin, seems all you get from the FPA/AFA/FAAA. Focus on the 80% that renewed, not the 20% that have left. I would be very concerned if that happened to my business. That is a damming number, showing how fed up advisers are with an association that nicely agrees with every piece of bad regulation or decision announced instead of going into bat for their members. Maybe the FAAA could go and talk to the mortgage broker association and see how to properly represent their members.
Suddenly there was a $50 admin fee to go from AFA to FAAA. Where did that come from? It’s nice little earner that was never disclosed in any of the sales pitch to move over to FAAA.
Not bad for an organisation that purports to represent advisers, who live off knowledge and disclosure of all the details in PDS
Or, did the FAA a contract this service out to third party?