In a statement, the business urged financial services professionals to “stop confusing Australians with unnecessary jargon and to keep things simple” in the wake of the royal commission.
“The royal commission has highlighted some questionable and unethical behavior from some well-known organisations,” said InvestSMART chief executive Ron Hodge.
“Australians have had enough of the finance industry using jargon and unccessarily complex ways of showing critical information.”
InvestSMART’s remarks come off the back of research conducted by the company that found 96 per cent of the business’ members “showed a strong preference for independent financial decision-making”.
“The qualitative survey also uncovered a wariness and, in some cases, an outright rejection of seeking financial advice, with fees and opaque commission structures among the biggest concerns,” the company said.
Mr Hodge added that the current regulatory environment will likely cause further trust issues for the financial services industry moving forward.
Earlier this year, UNSW law professor and former Queensland regional commissioner Pamela Hanrahan made similar remarks regarding regulation and trust, commenting that the most likely outcome from the royal commission will be added layers of regulation.
“The most difficult thing for politicians to do will be to reduce the amount of nonsense, counterproductive legislation we have at the moment,” she said.
“The last thing they’re going to do is come out of the royal commission to say to the general public ‘we’re going to get rid of three-quarters of this regime’, but we will never fix it until we do.”
Waz, sounds great mate goz ya got best returns for farkin ever – sign me up.
What would be even better is being able to provide advice without that 80 page disclosure and disclaimer document affectionately referred to as an SOA. Perhaps it should be just an internal document…well maybe it already is given it’s mainly the audit people who read them. Let’s just give the client a summary letter and they can request a copy of the SOA if they want it.
Farking, G’day cobber, just farkin put you’re money in this farkin fund and I’ll sort ya out. No wukkas.