Dealer group to pay commissions direct to members

Partners Life’s move to pay override commissions directly to advisers is further reshaping the industry.

Wednesday, May 19th 2021, 1:59PM

MySolutions, which has 280 adviser members, has made a significant change to how it works and now full commission paid by insurers goes directly to members.

It has also introduced a subscription model, group chief executive Kevin Smee says members will be “paying a nominal fee of $50 per month for membership of the group and access to its group benefits, ongoing business development training sessions and basic member services.”

Since Partners Life introduced its FAPO model Fidelity Life has come out with its own version and Good Returns understands Asteron is putting the finishing touches to a new remuneration model.

Smee says under its new model members “will generally be many thousands of dollars per year better off just through accessing the groups buying power, and that’s before we factor in the pay rises, they are pretty much all getting from the insurers.”

MySolutions have been working on this development over the last 18 months and had signaled strongly to stakeholders that they would be doing things very differently, Smee says.

The group has become more of a service provider rather than a traditional dealer group. It is not a FAP and is not a registered firm.

Smee says MySolutions exists to “assist independent advice businesses to grow in scale and value.”

“Adviser business development that gets real commercial results is our reason for being,” he says.

“This group is unique in that it is led by advisers, for advisers. The one thing we all have in common is that we are all running and building our own advisory firms – and we’ve got a lot of experience and the runs on the board to show that we know how to grow successful practices.”

“That’s what we do well, and we intend to stick to doing it and leave all the market noise stuff to other better placed service providers. We just want to make sure our members have the funding to pay for the various requirements around mortgage aggregation, CRM systems, compliance and so on, but be totally free to decide which of those choices is right for them.”

Tags: FAP FAPO mySolutions