Australian financial advice groups are struggling to add a great deal of value to the planners licensed through them and are struggling to assist advisers with their most pressing businesses challenges in tough market conditions.

Business planning, marketing & communications and practice development are the three most significant drivers of planner/licensee satisfaction, with new research revealing they account for a 70 per cent weighting of satisfaction drivers (using multiple regression analysis).

Yet these areas are of service offer are typically underdone by licensee groups – to their credit though these areas are also the hardest ‘nuts to crack’ when providing financial planners with support services.

The industry, barring a few exceptions, is generally weak in the quality of services offered in these three critical areas.

With new business down effective marketing and communications is fundamental to advice business weathering the economic storm, while having access to good sales support and quality business planning remains the holy-grail for businesses in good times or bad.

In the recently released CoreData Licensee Study 2009, AXA-owned ipac was deemed the best in the first two categories (business planning and marketing and communications), while Financial Wisdom has the most effective PDMs and business development support.

Out of ten categories, which had 50 underlying measures rated, the highest absolute satisfaction scores (excludes satisfaction drivers) were in technical service and commissions and brokerage.

These are ‘ticket to play’ services that advisers expect to be of a high calibre.

Interestingly with an-all hands on deck mentality prevalent among advisers in these tricky times, paraplanning services, education and training all had by far the weakest correlation driver relationship with satisfaction.