Losses again dominated Wealth Data’s most recent analysis of adviser movements with the effective closure (down to zero advisers) of another 62 small self-licensed AFSLs on top of the 47 that closed the previous week.
Wealth Data’s Colin Williams writes in his weekly report that it appears that ASIC continues to catch up with the licensees that had not been removing advisers that did not pass the adviser exam.
He says that calendar YTD, 173 licensees have closed and 291 closed for this current financial year.
The number of licensees has dropped below 2,000 to 1,944.
Williams adds that those who have kept track of the closures, might be thinking that the calendar YTD figure should be much greater than 173. But his firm has noticed that many of the advisers now ceased (resigned) have been backdated into 2021, over 30 in the latest week alone.
“For our weekly reporting, we take a snapshot of the data and compare to last week and calculate weekly change.” He says this eliminates the issues of backdating. For all other reporting, they use the actual reporting dates of adviser movement on the ASIC FAR.
“Therefore, many of the adviser losses and licensee closures shown as a weekly loss are backdated into 2021. Note the very high number of licensee closures for the current financial year at 291, versus 147 for the corresponding time period,” he says.
Williams also says that most of the ceased licensees have a few things in common such as being small.
“For example, 48 having just one adviser. Their offer to the public is normally quite limited such as SMSF only advice.
“Having reviewed some of the ‘other’ licensees, it is not clear as to what they offer to the general public, but it may have been useful to the business to have an authorised adviser,” he says.
Key adviser movements this week
- Net change of advisers -129
- Number of advisers now at 16,783
- 25 Licensee Owners had net gains of 36 advisers
- 121 Licensee Owners had net losses for 170 advisers
- 3 new licensees commenced and 62 closed
- Five provisional advisers commenced and two ceased
