With the FBAA's National Conference fast approaching Broker News caught up with Peter White, FBAA National President, to see what is big on the agenda and what brokers should be prioritising.
Video transcript below:
Anna Temple, Australian Broker Online
Anna Temple: With FBAA’s national conference fast approaching, we caught up with Peter White, FBAA National President to see what’s big on the agenda and what brokers should be prioritising. Firstly White stresses the importance of keeping on top of compliance at all times.
Peter White, FBAA National President
Peter White: It’s important that we all keep focussed on our compliance obligations at all times. If we don’t take care of those levels of obligations, so remembering they are still relatively new, July 2010 they came into being, so people are still juggling with these obligations to make sure they are doing the right things. And we still see it today, where people that I would have thought, who have been in the industry 5, 10, 15 years, but we still find people who are struggling with these obligations or compliance. So, we believe that it’s our, part of our means and reasons to being to ensure that people are upto date on their compliance obligations, that they revisit it, that they rethink it and they ensure they double check that they are doing the right things.
Anna Temple: When it comes to the upcoming new privacy and responsible credit reporting changes White says there will be significant impacts to the way brokers deal with the information given to them by clients and that staying on top of these changes will be critical.
Peter White: We ourselves are still working through with our attorneys at the moment, there are going to be some significant impacts from privacy act point of view and how you interact with information that you have on behalf of clients and who you give that to. It’s not going to be a simpler process, I guess or as a straight forward a process as to what it may have been in the past, even though some of these obligations are still a part of our business today, the screws are really being tightened up.
Anna Temple: Finally, White advises that many brokers need to start thinking bigger, strategising long term in case further legislation is brought in.
Peter White: And it’s very easy to sit back and just do what you do every day and not worry too much about the future. But I think it’s something that we have got to be very conscious of and we can see the FOFA reforms that are impacting into the financial planning sector and we have got to be careful that those things don’t necessarily mirror across into the broking arena and it could well do. Fee for service is used by many brokers at the moment and it could well be that you know, everybody needs to have a plan B in their pocket, if those sort of reforms come across into our sector. So it’s one of probably several issues that brokers need to be concerned about and not pre-empting anything and not suggesting it’s going to happen. But if you don’t have a plan B, if you don’t have thought about these sort of things it could impact your future, then you could quite easily wind up being caught short, if it does come about.
Anna Temple: This is Anna Temple reporting for Australian Broker Online.
