The legislation of a fiduciary duty for financial planners could lead to more Australians investing directly into managed funds, according to Fidelity International.

"Creating a fiduciary role for financial planners has to be a more costly system to maintain and yet we want all Australians to have the opportunity to make better informed decisions," Fidelity International managing director Australia Gerard Doherty said.

"The boundary between general and personal advice might be shifting slightly," Doherty said.

"If you shift the boundary a little bit and allow for more information to be given to Australians to help them make decisions about their investments that may create in a 10-20 year view a larger direct customer market place in Australia."

Under a fiduciary duty, advice would remain important, but the point at which people would seek advice might change, he said.

However, he did not expect to see much change in the financial services industry over the next two years as most financial services companies would await any legislative changes coming out of the Joint Parliamentary Committee Review into Financial Products and Services and the Super System (Cooper) Review.

Despite the impact of the global financial crisis, Fidelity's Australian business has had a good 2009, Doherty said at the briefing.

"We started the year at US$1.7 billion in funds under management, I say US dollars, because all the reports I get are in US dollars," he said.

"We finished the year at US$4.1 or 4.2 million. That is good, strong funds flow and obviously the markets have helped us."
 
Doherty said the company had seen about $1.3 billion net inflows in Australian dollars in 2009, and Fidelity had a good pipeline for 2010.

"We've got committed funds of probably A$600-700 million in the first quarter of next year," he said.

"If you would have told me in March that we ended here, I would not have believed it and would have put some money on it."