Most consumers distrust advisers

  Getting totally sick and tired of these self appointed experts, who try and convince all and sundry that advisers are an untrustworthy bunch of crooks. All of this expert evidence comes under the guise of "research" - bit like Japan carrying out "Scientific research whaling".

These people should just crawl back under their rocks, instead of encouraging "Adviser bashing" to become a national sport.

  Looks like the industry fund campaign to discredit advisers has accomplished it's goal then. Where's the equity in that, I ask you?

I mean after you have various scandals and losses at industry funds never hitting the main stream media and being buried on page 52 of the financial papers. Like the losses at one industry fund in particular, union officials being sued for sitting fees received from industry funds, shadow shopping surveys, which showed industry fund advisers were poorly ranked by consumers against both bank and non-aligned planners.

The politicians, regulators, crooked media, rabid consumer groups and the unions have a lot to answer for. It would be interesting to find out how much the media get out of the industry fund cake. I mean how much would it cost to have a 24/7 365 day a year, prime time TV ad campaign run on all the major networks?

We in the profession who try to do the right thing by our clients know the truth and we shouldn't let all this negativity get to us. The silent majority of good advisers will just keep serving their clients as they always have. Be it a fee for service environment, fiduciary duty, FOFA environment or whatever else the bureaucrats and lefty politicos can dream up.

  Breaches aside, advisers are in a no-win situation (as the research explicitly consistently shows us), because of the intrinsic nature in which the financial product, and various interests, are embedded in the advice process.

Additionally, financial advisers are unique in this situation. It is difficult to make make any comparison to another profession, as Brad Fox suggests, until the product is removed from the process.

  If you take an objective look at the policies and systems that most "own product" providing Australian Financial Services Licences enforce on their "product sales team" otherwise know as financial advisers or to the industry "authorised representatives", you will find a very strong slant to own product advice. It is this bias system that leaves many clients feeling that they have been sold.

I propose a question; should financial services product creators be given the right to offer clients "Advice" or is this office of "Advice" really just sales hidden behind "Advice"?

I agree most financial advisers are good planners with many benefits and skills that clients can access to improve their financial security and tax outcome. In my opinion ASIC has created this problem for the customer by allowing the financial services product creators to give "advice" on their own product. What is advice and what is sales this is what the client is having trouble with.

True advice or pure advice is what we as advisers should be pushing for, not the creation of conflicted advice by working under an AFSL that is selling a wrap or insurance product created by a related company(or even worse white label someone else's product as their own).

If we look at this entire financial planning process and result from the clients perspective you can see why surveys are getting these results and the lack of trust.

As soon as the regulator defines the difference between "direct sales" and the higher level of Financial Planning "advice" their will always be this lack of trust.

As the director of an independently owned AFSL we aim to provide the Australian market with pure advice not product sales, after all this is what FoFA is all about, I just think that all this could be sorted out much better if the client could see the difference between product sales and true client benefit based advice.