Neil Bruce Trower has been banned after it was found that between August and December 2015, Mr Trower failed to provide a number of clients with a statement of advice at the time of oral provision of advice and also “applied the signatures of a number of clients to both internal and external documents for the purpose of passing an internal compliance audit”.
ASIC said the former ANZ adviser’s conduct was “dishonest” and revealed that Millenium3 identified the activity during an internal audit.
“Certain compliance requirements are in place for advisers to ensure they are meeting their obligations to clients, and to ensure they act honestly and with integrity,” said ASIC deputy chair Peter Kell.
“Anyone whose conduct falls short of these standards will be removed from the financial services industry.”
I have to admit the amount of advisers who only have a DFP or ADFP is staggering. A friend of mine did his DFP in 2 days and is technically allowed to give advice once licenced. I think the new FOFA rules around education should be stricter in not allowing people to do watered down degrees.
If this “friend” is indeed a real person, it would be interesting to know if they have been able to get a job as a licensed adviser. It’s one thing to meet the theoretical minimum standards, but these days very few employers or licensees are willing to appoint someone unless they have far higher qualifications.
If only he had done the adfp or cfp hey. If only he had a degree in finance, if only he had done his 30 or 60 hours of study. OF ONLY HE PAID HIS FPA COURSES AND MEMBERSHIP.
As we all know having these course, degrees and member fees paid is a guarantee of good behaviour. Tick.
All pigs fed and ready to fly.
Financial Planning credibility has risen to just above an amway salesmen but still below a used car salesmen. Thank you FPA. You have destroyed this industry via compliance red tape and 60 page soa’s, well down clowns.
That’s fine Steven as a broad shot at the Industry across the bow – except that the actual rate of issues, incidents and complaints for less qualified Advisers is much higher than the incident rate for better qualified Advisers.
plus I imagine those, as Steven described, have more to lose than someone who did a 2 week course.
So what was M3 thinking when they asked this guy to join their ranks…oh yes…can he sell…come on. We cannot have this nonsense still going on surely.? Isn’t it strange that this comes up in an internal audit from M3 in 2015. ? Investigation occurs and we are 2017. Ws this person STILL practicing and if so why.? We have lazy fools in charge and while cups of tea and biscuits are had in discussions with committees the nonsense continues. As for the regulators….what can I say ? WTF Wake up for the sake of folks that matter most. The consumer !!!!
According to the FAR on 23/08/17, the ONLY qualification for this person was “2002 Specialist Regulated Financial Service Knowledge (Financial Planning) King’s International College”.
It’s a little hard to throw rocks without knowing the full story. I might be wrong here but I’d imagine the gaols would be filled with planners for telling people to “”pay off the home mortgage and then come back and see me””, and they haven’t provided a SoA for that strategy… I’m pretty sure about 100,000 Accountants would need to be sent to Gaol for telling people to just buy the big banks and TLS and have a term deposit in their SMSF also. Or even set up the SMSF and rollover your Hesta Super and buy that commercial property…Maybe ASIC should start chasing accountants up? Red Tap is a killer and stories like this that only tell the half the story are interesting to say the least.
No rocks thrown. Just an objective fact on the public record.