The corporate regulator has urged Australians who are seeking financial advice to only connect with licenced professionals.
Speaking to ABC Melbourne this week, ASIC COO Warren Day said people should check the Financial Advisers Register (FAR) to ensure they are engaging with planners who are legally required to act in their best interests.
“While using a licensed adviser doesn’t guarantee against financial loss, dealing with licensed professionals provides important safeguards if things go wrong,” Mr Day said.
“This may include remediation of investors who have suffered loss or detriment as a result of misconduct or other compliance failure by an advice licensee (or its representatives) in giving personal advice. Importantly, it also includes recourse to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA), a free external dispute resolution body.
Mr Day added that while recommendations from friends are common, people should always “independently check” if that person is licensed or authorised to provide advice through a licensee as many scams have operated through social media and referrals.
“It pays to do your homework and check that your adviser is both qualified and licensed, or authorised, to do the job,” he said.
Mr Day’s comments come after ASIC alerted consumers to a rise in investment scams impersonating companies or financial investment firms in March.
The regulator warned that scammers often make contact through Gmail and Outlook email accounts and that their contact details do not match the information published on the legitimate company’s website.
Consumers are also being urged to be careful of receiving calls or messages “out of the blue” and that scammers may request remote access to their computer and/or contact them online advising them about a “great investment opportunity”.
This says everything about ASIC’s agenda. Their view is the only reason to go see a licensed adviser is you can sue them. Not that they are professionals who provide high quality advice and satisfy a ridiculous level of compliance. Mr Day’s view is licensed advisers are the same as scammers. As a leader at ASIC it proves the internal hatred of advisers that exists and influences every decision they make.
I’m just glad I listened closely to all those TikTok finfluencers telling me to go nuts on crypto. Oh, hang on…
ASIC: Make sure you see a licensed adviser – it removes all your investment risk !
Also direct quote from ASIC “we wish advisers were more like storm financial” all the while ignored warning from other advisers on the ground…
What an inane recommendation by someone who should know better. Not an ounce of diplomacy or understanding of what Advisers have to do and know to become what we are. To tell people the main reason to come and see us is you can sue or be remediated by us and you can’t get that form the unlicensed (non) Advisers, is to paint us again in nothing but a negative light. How can our industry ever establish our credentials as trusted professionals when no one is pointing to all the time, effort, hard work, long hours, ongoing study, over regulated work processes and our obvious. majority commitment to improving the lot in life of all our clients, it takes just to be one of us. Incompetent, unthinking, gratuitous crap comments like this are exactly the sort of recommendations we don’t need from these nothing but bloody-minded regulator’s managers.
Someone at ASIC has finally figured out that ASIC’s indiscriminate vilification and persecution campaign against all licensed advisers, while ignoring harmful unlicensed advice, has pushed consumers away from relative safety and into harms way.
Coming from a regulator who could not tell between a good apple and a bad apple. ASIC it may well be proven stuff up on your part to have already let through fin-fluencers and digital advice providers to prosper when you cannot deal with the future bottleneck of complaints being lodged against you. 2 words: Be accountable.