With just days to go until the new regulatory regime starts on March 15, Steven Burgess, CEO Compliance Refinery, says that while there are a range of tools and operational templates to help advisers, using them will be their biggest challenge.
“Most advisers have a lot of experience at being really good financial advisers,” he says. “But adhering to new systems under the Financial Services Legislation Amendment Act going to be the biggest challenge, because a lot of them do not have much experience doing that.”
Burgess also points to the increasing cost of doing business as something advisers need to consider. While he wasn’t prepared to put a dollar figure on this, he says the reality is that compliance costs are going up.
“Licensing costs are going up, professional indemnity insurance is going up, cyber and IT costs are going up…So how do advisers get better and more efficient? That’s what we always work on with our businesses to try and achieve,” he says.
“Then consider cyber security…we’ve just had a cyber review completed and there’s a few thousand dollars there. These are costs that I don’t think a lot of companies have borne previously.
“But now it’s not only best practice but almost mandatory that advisers provide clients and product providers with the assurance that they meet a certain standard in the protection of client data and information.”
This week the Compliance Refinery started its fourth year in business and now has seven members of staff, including a recently-hired legal adviser and a productivity manager.
Burgess says the firm has plans to continue growing this year and is in the process of implementing new data management systems.
“As we have been growing, getting more and more clients, that becomes something that’s ever-required and I think that with any business it needs to make sure it continues to provide a strong service to clients and add value to their businesses,” he says.