Abood details FAAA’s goal to grow the adviser pool

In an interview with Ausbiz, FAAA chief executive Sarah Abood said that in order to help Australians become financially secure, there need to be more quality advisers entering the industry.

“One of the challenges that we do have is that there are not enough financial advisers to go around,” Ms Abood said.

“Essentially, Australians are looking for help and we’ve managed to create this system that’s so incredibly complex, that it’s almost impossible for anybody to navigate on their own. So, we need that help.”

As more Australians enter retirement every year, Ms Abood added that action needs to be taken to address the imbalance of advisers available.

“We’ve got nearly, I think over 16 million now working age Australian so then need is really, really strong and it’s growing every year,” she said.

“We’ve got less than 16,000 financial advisers so we really need to address that demand supply imbalance, which is currently really strong. We need more great financial advisers in Australia and that’s a big priority to this association.”

Ms Abood said that the FAAA is looking to grow the size of the financial adviser pool through conversations with prospective advisers.

“We’re really keen to talk to people about what a fantastic career this is. There’s certainly a great demand for people’s services,” she said.

“There’s two groups of people that we’re really wanting to talk to and one is the typical group of school leavers who are thinking about what degree will they do next? What career do they want to pursue? And we want to talk to them about how great a financial planning career can be. What is involved in completing a financial planning degree, completing the professional year, and what are the opportunities to do that?”

She added that there are also a lot of “career changers” that might look to a career in financial advice.

“When you speak to financial planners today, many of them pursued another career first, they might have been a teacher or an economist or an accountant or perhaps an actuary,” Ms Abood said.

“There’s lots of different types of people that have come across financial planning in their lives for a range of reasons. They might have been through a financial crisis or something of that nature and come to understand what that career does and how important it is, and they’ve wanted to pursue it.

“So, we’re really keen to talk to people who have had those other life experiences and can bring that experience to a career as a financial planner as well.”