On Monday, ASIC confirmed the banning of Frederick Steven Ackerman of Pure Strategy, which had its licence cancelled on 16 September due to its failure to comply with its general obligations.
“ASIC found that Pure Strategy failed to have adequate resources to carry out a financial services business, failed to maintain competence to provide the financial services under its licence, and failed to ensure its representatives complied with financial services laws,” the corporate regulator said in a statement.
“Pure Strategy also failed to comply with its licence condition to have a ‘key person’.”
Mr Ackerman was found to have failed to act in the best interests of his clients and at times failed to identify clients’ financial situation and needs and identify the matter of the advice sought.
He was also found to have not at times base all of his judgments on his client’s circumstances and put his clients “in a better position” if they followed his advice.
ASIC concluded that Mr Ackerman “is neither competent nor a fit and proper person to provide a financial service”.
Mr Ackerman and Pure Strategy can seek a review of ASIC’s decision through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
ASIC don’t want small individual players in the market because it makes their job harder and they have more responsibility. By forcing as many out as they can, or turning the rest against the idea of running their own show and to join Dealer Groups instead it passes that responsibility to the compliance managers instead. When “s” hits the fan then ASIC can go after the adviser AND the Dealer Group and chalk up another victory thereby keeping themselves in the press and in jobs.
I’m not so sure about this argument that ASIC doesn’t want smaller licensees because it makes their jobs harder. While this may be true from a pure quantity perspective, it is not the case from an advice quality point of view. Larger licensees will almost always be slanting their advice processes to sell more of their own inhouse product. This is one of the biggest underlying causes of bad advice. Smaller licensees are much less likely to have inhouse products.
Just sell clients crypto! don’t need to licensed for that . Asic can’t do anything about it either.
And how does ASIC issue a licence to these supposedly ill managed and equipped business, under professionally trained and proper persons. Do they review their poor decisions leading to finacial loss.
You can expect another 200 or 300 hundred of these going forward.
Yet advisers all want to be self license but don’t understand the enormity of the task
All big licensees want to convince advisers that they cannot run a license so that they have control over them and can make them sell their financial products.
like Doctors and Tradies….
So true….just like Doctors and Tradies….I just don’t know how they can be self licensed and run a business…perhaps we need big Pharma to step in and license Doctors don’t we….and the tradies licensed under Ryobi or Reece.
I suspect this guy’s banning had less to do with him being unable to run his licence, and more to do with being a crappy adviser. He would have been booted no matter what his licensing arrangements. (Unless he was completely unlicensed, in which case he wouldn’t attract ASIC’s attention until he had stolen at least $20M based on the Caddick threshold).
ASIC takes great pleasure in terrorizing small players because they can’t fight back and they enjoy watching these businesses crash and burn and ruining the lives of the advisers who spent the past 20 years building it up, Dover was a classic example of this bcz over 400 advisers were given 30 days to move out or lose their business.
Mr Ben Kosch – It is not the enormity of the task – It is about the Best Interest of our clients!