Our customers rely on and trust the advice that we give them regarding our financial products and services, and their financial planning and needs. This advice is provided largely through our financial advisers. Therefore firstly, we need to ensure that we provide sufficient qualified and compliant advisers to cover all potential customer needs, geographic areas and language groups so as to make our services accessible to all. We are challenged by attracting enough black advisers to Old Mutual, which is a limiting factor in our drive to improve accessibility to certain language and cultural groups. We are also concerned that the percentage of less experienced advisers is increasing, potentially compromising the quality of advice we provide to customers.
Secondly, in order to provide the highest quality of financial advice, we have a responsibility to ensure that our advisers (both tied agents and brokers) are provided with the right skills and are updated on any changes in legislation and products. While the new Conflict of Interest legislation has had an impact on Old Mutual, the revised ways of working with and rewarding our brokers have resulted in better transparency and integrity. Similarly, the Protection of Personal Information Act has impacted our business, requiring us to improve structures for protecting our customers’ information. Within Retail Mass Market (RMM), we still have too many non-compliant sales agents. We are seeing a downward trend in the training of black advisers and in the extent to which advisers are training themselves beyond minimum compliance requirements; this is of concern. However, we have made good progress in developing an indicator model to review brokers’ practices as a whole, taking into account service to clients as well as productivity.
Lastly, the sustainability of financial advisers’ businesses is important to ensure we retain the investment in skills and can provide our customers with continuity of service over the long-term. We therefore work to support our advisers in running their businesses profitably, a growing challenge given the increased stringency of regulations and associated costs. We continue to see good progress in practice owners nearing retirement engaging in succession planning, and the quality of the practices entering our Practice of the Year competition also continues to improve.