Institute of Financial Advisers president Nigel Tate said he would like to see a bit more promotion from regulators about who advisers are, what they do and how they are qualified.

“A lot of practitioners are spending a lot of time explaining that to consumers but many say ‘I don’t care, I’ve known you for 20 years, where do I sign?’”

Tate expects the introduction within 12 months of some form of simplified disclosure regime, similar to that used in Australia by ASIC, to allow advisers to more easily scale their advice.

“Scaled advice doesn’t necessarily mean lower quality advice but it’s not so in-depth and doesn’t have to be a 20-page document; you can do four to five pages and make it a bit simpler.”

Tate said he would also like to see less sniping between Authorised Financial Advisers (AFAs) and Registered Financial Advisers (RFAs).

“There needs to be more focus on good standards which are not exclusively the domain of AFAs; there are some very competent RFAs out there I would consider to be professionals.”

Murray Weatherston said he hopes that global markets settle down into something like the “old normal” and interest rates start to rise again.

“You’ve got a situation where interest rates are at rock bottom because the outlook for economies isn’t strong, but in the last year equity markets rose quite strongly; it seems to me to be quite contrarian to each other.

“I’d like to see central banks suddenly start raising interest rates because they no longer think the bottom is going to fall out.”

Weatherston had another, non-financial wish: “I’d love to see the New Zealand cricket team perform a lot better.”