The Financial Services Industry controls most of our life savings as well as our life and general insurances. But most of us have very little knowledge of how it operates.

Essentially your funds are pooled in a variety of ways with those of other people (e.g. into an investment pool or a risk insurance pool) and the returns from these pools are supposed to help fund whatever it is you are trying to achieve (retirement, general savings, protection from certain events affecting your business, family etc,).

But how do your funds get from your hip pocket to the big pools?

Usually they get there via a third party (a financial adviser) who recommends you put your money into a particular financial product (could be savings, super, life insurance, home insurance, car insurance etc.).

But how does the adviser select the product they recommend?

Unfortunately this is where a lot of the obvious conflicts of interest arise. Financial services is a highly competitive market and one way financial product issuers (like some of the companies behind the fund pools mentioned above) get advisers to recommend their products is to reward them with a commission, or even a less obvious “reward” like a holiday, subsidised training, accommodation, computer support or an employee bonus payment.

Sometimes the commission is payable on the upfront amount you invest, sometimes it is based on the ongoing amount held (including earnings) and sometimes it is both.

You may already have funds sitting in a product (e.g. your super) that is paying a third party adviser a "trail" commission. This could be going on for years and may bear no relation to the level of service (if any) you currently get from that person.

The law requires that all these commissions be disclosed at the time a recommendation is made to you, but in reality this often means you are given a large amount of paperwork that includes the disclosure amongst an assortment of other complex information.

Interestingly there is a growing number of advisers who will only accept commissions if they first reach an agreement with their clients about the services they will provide to them in return. They would prefer to explain their costs to you upfront and in the form of a pre-agreed fee-for-service arrangement. But these advisers still appear to be in the minority.

That is why we established this website, to showcase those advisers who are:

100% independent;
100% fee-for-service; or
Fee-for-service upon request

And none of them are aligned to or controlled by any financial product issuers (like banks, insurance companies or fund managers).