A Move in the Right Direction: Client Relationships in Financial Advice

The Australian financial advice industry continues to be the subject of ongoing regulatory reform largely driven by persistent failures of advice and products. Despite these concerns, many Australian consumers continue to have productive, effective, and high-quality relationships with their financial adviser. This article seeks to understand the determinants of quality in these relationships both contemporaneously and how this has changed over time. Deploying a research instrument used in a study in 2009, we compare and contrast the views of practitioners and clients both with updated data and over time. We find once again that systematic differences in the perceptions of professional-client relationship quality exist. We find that these perceptions have changed over time, with high-wealth clients’ perceptions differing from those of other clients, just as the perceptions of more highly educated financial advisers differ from those of advisers with less education. Overall, relationship quality has increased over a number of dimensions.