Off the back of the Hayne Royal Commission, changes in the way we manage and administer Financial Disclosure Statements (FDS) and Renewal notices (Opt-ins) have been introduced with legislation coming into effect on the 1st July 2021.
What is changing
Where we provide Clients with an ongoing fee arrangement, we will now need to provide:
Annual Renewal (Opt-in)
Originally this was every two years and did not include clients that we onboarded prior to 1/7/2013. This has now been changed to include all clients and for an annual opt-in.
Enhanced Fee Disclosure Statement (FDS)
While we have been providing these statements for our existing clients, there have been a few amendments. The statement must now include:
Consent to Ongoing Fee Arrangements
Written consent from the client is now required to enable a fee recipient to deduct ongoing fees from a client’s account. Fee recipients could include ourselves if we were debiting ongoing fees and/or other institutions such as Macquarie Wrap, Netwealth, Hub24, etc.
We understand that there are institutions that are proposing a universal client consent form but this is still a continued discussion. At this stage, we will need to use the institution’s own forms in addition to ours to obtain consent.
We have combined all of these into the one statement that the client will now need to sign. These statements will be sent to clients on the anniversary of their Ongoing Service Agreement and they will have 120 days to sign and return the form otherwise we will need to cease fees and services.
To speak to our client services team, please call 03 9863 9849 or contact us at clientservices@drakkargroup.com.au