To enhance our understanding of the availability of financial advice in New Zealand, including where consumers go to get advice, we are undertaking a review focusing on challenges and opportunities related to access to financial advice.
Since the new financial advice regime came into effect in 2021, monitoring has helped us understand how quality and accessibility of advice work together.
Our view is quality and accessibility are complementary but can also have trade-offs.
Ensuring consumers can access quality financial advice when they need it is crucial. We know there are many positive impacts on consumers who receive good quality financial advice.
This review will help us understand opportunities and challenges in relation to consumer access to financial advice.
What we learn from this review will inform our areas of regulatory focus, including deciding what further work we may need to undertake in our role of monitoring the regime and ensuring it is fulfilling its purpose.
We plan to publish any relevant insights and engage with the market on our findings.
We will aim to share constructive insights that may highlight opportunities for improvement, for individual financial advice providers or the sector as a whole.
Where we identify issues that are having undesirable impacts on access to financial advice, we will consider the best steps to address these.
This could include:
- issuing new guidance
- evolving our monitoring focus
- making recommendations if we identify gaps or potential improvements that need to be addressed, or improving consumer awareness.
Insights from our review will help ensure we take appropriate actions to improve outcomes both for consumers and the financial advice industry, and that the financial advice regime succeeds in improving the availability of quality financial advice.
Read the review's terms of reference here:
Access to advice confirmed terms of reference [PDF 305KB]