Speaking to SMSF Adviser, Wealth Within chief analyst Dale Gillham said planners and accountants need to accept the shifting SMSF regulatory landscape and work together for the sake of their clients.
“They need to play in the same sandbox, so they need to get along and work with each other for the benefit of the person at the other end. The focus needs to be on the client and not on themselves,” he said.
“It’s not about trying to protect your turf, it’s about working with the client. The client is the critical person, and they determine who the adviser is that they use at any one time.”
However, Mr Gillham said he is confident there will be a peaceful merging of accounting and financial planning practices in the long term.
“It’s not just the accountant and the financial planner, it’s the mortgage broker. The client has different needs and changing needs all the time … they need to drift towards whoever the right person is at the right time,” he added.
Accountants in particular need to adjust their business models to suit the new regulatory landscape, Skeggs Goldstein’s Jonathan Reynolds told SMSF Adviser.
“The bar is rising significantly for accountants because clients are expecting more. However, in many cases, they’re not getting it or receiving the advice they deserve,” Mr Reynolds said.
“Businesses that are only offering basic compliance and taxation advice are not being as competitive as they could be in the marketplace, and certainly are not offering as much as they could be to their clientele.
“This does not mean to scrap the basic compliance and tax services altogether, it’s just a way of forging new relationships with your clients that would otherwise not occur if you did not take the initiative,” he added.
Peter Vickers.. How unusual (not) it is for an Accountant to see themselves at the centre of peoples universe. If only others saw it that way. Your level of understanding about advice is telling if you feel all investment and mortgage advice involves tax advice…Pleeeese. I suspect the view of your importance is a highly personal one.
Some accountants don’t know what the game is if they think somehow they have won something. Clients desire outcomes not the collation of history. Clients place little or no value on tax returns and financial statements and compliance. You should ask them. Many accountants can hardly be considered champions of implementation unless of course that consists of a bank account only. But hey you are welcome to your expertise in putting history together, a role that is fast being outsourced to India and the Philippines for less than a happy meal an hour. Congratulations you ‘won’ pass go and collect your redundancy.
I am a Chartered Accountant and my firm has a full AFSL.
The war is over. The accountants have won. That is, the accountant firms as hypothesised by Mr Gillman. You cannot give investment advice or mortgage advice without giving tax advice, and then the advice is useless if it is not carried out correctly and then finalised with the preparation of the financial statements and tax returns.
The next underbelly tv series