The impending start date for The Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) changes has seen financial intermediaries shift from preparing for the new regime to looking at longer term opportunities to improve business.
Research conducted by Zurich Australia among financial advisers has found the main expectation about the FOFA shift will be a greater focus on efficiency and using technology to gain or improve their efficiency.
Zurich Life and Investments business General Manager Retail Philip Kewin says the results are a shift in thinking ahead of FOFA’s start date and show how advisers are using FOFA to make changes and improvements to the way they run their business.
Kewin says the greater focus on technology was closely tied to become more efficient with advisers seeing technology having a greater ability to improve their efficiency than other business practices like outsourcing or client segmentation.
According to Kewin the shift to using mobile technology has already begun with a 2011 survey finding that about one-third of advisers owned a tablet, up from less than 10 per cent in 2010. At the same time 21 per cent used them with clients, with that latter figure climbing to nearly 32 per cent at the close of 2012.
