Code committee chairman, and lawyer, David Ireland told the Professional Advisers Association conference in Auckland last week that he hoped to see a flight from registered to authorised status. “The hope is yes there will be movement…We do need more AFAs able to deliver advice. It’s a matter of how we encourage that to occur.”

He said it was not about making advice hard to deliver but about the accessibility of advice. “One of our concerns is the accessibility of advice.. there are only 2000 AFAs out there and two million Kiwis in KiwiSaver… we’ll be looking at options for how we help the industry to plug some of those gaps.”

Only a small portion of people would be able to get personalised KiwiSaver advice under current conditions.

Ireland said there was a full review of the FAA looming but a concern for the FMA was how to increase the number of AFAs without diminishing the quality of the advice pool. “The regulator is very motivated to be transparent and move things along.”

Grosvenor chief executive David Beattie said the future of financial advice was in retirement funding. “The obvious trend is our contributions will go up,  they need to go up at an increasing rate to get anywhere near where Australia is.”

Contributions would at least double, he said. “The opportunity in terms of the pool, the size of money, is going to be enormous.”

He said it was easy to build a commoditised life-stages default plan but advisers could add value. “You can step in and say ‘the best strategies for you as an individual are not based on your age as the single most important determining factor. Let me sit down and work out what you need’. But that’s why it’s going to be a threat,  it’s going to be commoditised, the fees for that are going to be really low.”