The Beddoes Institute has announced the winners of its inaugural Most Trusted Adviser Network (MTA) Awards with practices within the Securitor Financial Group, Hillross and Millenium 3 financial advice groups taking the top awards.
Securitor practice, Wealth Fusion in South Australian was named as the Most Trusted Practice National Winner while Hillross practice, Hillross Fairy Meadow in NSW was named as the Most Recommended Practice National Winner.
A further Securitor practice, SAM Group in NSW was named both Client Service National Winner and Fees and Value National Winner while Millenium 3 practice Mr Insurance was named New Client Engagement National Winner.
The Most Trusted Adviser Award went to Greg Lourens of the SAM Group while David Reed from The Retirement Advice Centre, a Millenium 3 practice, was named as Most Recommended Adviser. Lourens was also named as the winner of the Communication and Interpersonal Relationships Award and Technical Expertise Award.
Beddoes Institute, Director, Dr Rebecca Shiels said the awards winners and finalists were selected based on how they were rated by their clients in Beddoes Institute’s Client Experience Survey during 2015 and each of the award winners had consistent strengths across key attributes including client trust, advocacy and willingness to recommend to family and friends.
“The MTA awards are based on 3,750 advice client ratings across 137 of Australia’s top MTA advisers and 64 MTA practices,” Sheils said.
“Adding further to the robustness of the award process, advisers and practices needed at least 20 client ratings and a response rate of more than 30% to be eligible for an award,” Sheils stated, with award recipients typically having a client survey response rate of 47%.
Collectively the four national and ten state adviser awards were won by nine financial advisers while the five national and ten state practice awards were won by eight financial advice practices with Securitor practices and advisers winning six of the nine national awards, with the Millennium3 and Hillross Financial Services networks taking out the remaining three national awards.
Should be called the most trusted advice winners for advisers that were happy to pay $1,500 to participate in the award. For a truly independent award you should not have to pay to participate. There are many advisers around that choose not to pay and participate but are outstanding at what they do, but their focus is on their clients not themselves.
Really Charlie. Who would be conducting these comprehensive reviews for free?
I don’t want to “muddy” the waters here as I really do not know how this all works ! But what does worry me is calling an award ” The most trusted adviser” To me this sort of promotion only lends fuel to the already outrageous situation that exists of distrust brought about by the very few “rogues” that infiltrate our wonderful long standing industry and limited and questionable reports from some so called Government agencies.
Might I respectfully suggest a name change to avoid more speculation that our industry is full of people you cannot trust.
To me and many others that is the way it comes across and is really just a promotional tool for these businesses and a slant on the overall behaviour
of thousand of advisers
I am not suggesting it should be done for free. I am saying in an industry where we have a high level of disclosure and must avoid conflicted situations it should be clearly disclosed that the only advisers participating in the award were advisers that were happy to pay $1,500, which is a very small portion of the adviser population. It is misleading therefore to call the award the most trusted adviser – should be called most trusted adviser that was willing to pay to participate in the award (in the interest of full disclosure and not being misleading).
In fact 137 advisers participated. How many are there in Australia (I think approx 7,000). What does the survey actually mean with a sample size of less than 2% of the adviser population.
Hi Charlie,
I think you may have misunderstood the MTA Network and our business model so I thought it would be helpful to clarify this. Our business runs client surveys and while we do this on a fee-for-service basis in some cases, these surveys are also used as part of screening and assessment processes for several other industry awards, including the AFA Adviser and Practice of the Year Awards which we do pro bono and have done so for many years.
You mention that the MTA Awards should be called “..the most trusted advice winners for advisers that were happy to pay $1,500 to participate in the award.” As it happens, most of the winners of our MTA awards have come through other industry award programs and have never paid us at all for any service.
As a result of our commercial and pro-bono activities we are exposed to many extraordinary advisers and practices. Beddoes Institute promotes quality advisers and practices to consumers pro-bono and engages in these awards and other industry activities to draw attention to these exemplars within the advice sector, also without remuneration. These activities, along with peer to peer learning are the basis of the Most Trusted Advisers Network.
There is no charge to advisers for MTA membership and we receive no revenue from the MTA Network. This network is funded from other parts of our business. We have learnt that by giving back, we benefit in a variety of non-financial ways. We have developed deep relationships with people that are shaping our profession and get to work with these advisers on an ongoing basis to advocate for quality advice. Success comes in many ways, it’s not always about money.
Finally, it takes a practice that is deeply committed to quality to survey their clients with the rigor we apply. And of those that do so, only the very best qualify as a Most Trusted Adviser. The qualifying criteria includes an Adviser Trust Score ™ of 85 or more and an NPS® of 50 or more as well as additional criteria for quality, experience and professionalism.
On this basis every adviser that belongs to the MTA Network deserves acknowledgement and recognition for the excellent work that they do with their clients. And now, the best of the best have been acknowledged with these MTA Awards.
This is a unique awards program. Advisers and practices cannot be nominated for an award but instead must pass several independent tests including a stringent test of adviser-client trust, which we believe lies at the heart of every quality advice relationship.
You are welcome to call us at our offices anytime to discuss these or other issues.
Kind regards,.
Rebecca Sheils (Director, the Beddoes Institute)
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