Kia ora - thank you for having me here today.
Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge all the members of the Financial Planning Standards Board who have travelled some great distances to be here today.
I hope you get a lot out of the summit, meet some old friends and make some new ones, as well as taking the opportunity to explore our beautiful part of the world.
Hosting the inaugural Financial Advice New Zealand Policy Summit in conjunction with the Financial Planning Standards Board Asia Pacific Forum is a huge undertaking, so I'd like to congratulate Nick Hakes and his team for all the work that has gone into pulling this event together.
I really value the opportunity to both listen and speak to the profession at these events. Most recently I spoke at the FANZ annual conference in March, where some of you might remember the FMA launched our Access to Advice report.
To provide some context for our international guests, we commissioned the Access to Advice review following some regulatory reforms in New Zealand, which were designed to lift standards of conduct across the financial advice sector and help ensure that quality financial advice remains available and accessible to those who need it.
Three years into the new regulatory regime, it was important for us to better understand the availability of financial advice in New Zealand and where consumers go to seek out advice. As part of the review, we published terms of reference, interviewed almost 80 stakeholders, conducted a consumer survey, and published our findings in the Access to Advice report. That report highlighted only 28 per cent of Kiwis received some kind of financial advice over the course of a year.
This was and is a concern for us. Financial advisers help support New Zealand consumers to understand risk, choose the right financial products and build and diversify their investments. Ultimately, at the heart of financial advice as you know is improving a client's overall financial wellbeing.
The report also aimed to start a conversation about some opportunities and challenges for the financial advice sector.
These included the chance to make the most of the flexibility offered by the way financial advice is regulated in New Zealand, and open the door to innovation, new ideas and helping make advice available and accessible to those who do not normally use it.
We want to help everyone get more comfortable with making the most of the flexibility available by working together with professional bodies like FANZ, other regulators as well as the wider sector.
A great example of this collaboration includes the FMA working with FANZ, to provide feedback on their first Common Practice Standard draft on around determining the nature and scope of advice, which highlights ways to make the most of the regime's flexibility, while still providing consumers with quality financial advice.
I want to strongly emphasise that we acknowledge a flexible regime may create some worries about what you can and can't do. We want you to make use of this to support innovation in your advice and commit to helping the sector to get up to speed quickly by working closely with professional bodies. Ultimately, greater access to advice supports the FMA's broader purpose of fostering the fairest financial sector in the world for all New Zealanders. I'll talk more about flexibility of the regime later in my presentation, including some case studies the FMA is developing.
Our report also highlighted an advice gap around helping older New Zealanders decumulate their retirement savings wisely.
We've been engaging closely with the sector on the report's findings over the last three months and I'll talk about some developments in the Access to Advice space shortly.
However, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to also discuss another very significant report we've released recently - the Financial Conduct Report.
It is the second time the FMA has published the FCR, which outlines our priorities for the sectors we regulate. The report also gives us the opportunity to highlight the impact of our activities over the past year.
