Just over 30 per cent of advisers at Australian Unity Personal Financial Services (AUPFS) are now specialising in advice for people in or who are thinking about moving into aged care facilities, the group has said.
AUPFS technical services national manager Craig Meldrum said there was probably only one in 10 advisers in the marketplace that specialised in advice for people accessing or planning to access aged care services.
"A few years ago we saw that there was a huge gap in the market in terms of advisers that specialised in advice for people considering aged care services and their families, who in situations of disability or illness often play a role in their finances," Meldrum said.
Acknowledging Australia's ageing population and wanting to create a point of difference in the marketplace, AUPFS began to host more workshops and master classes to assist advisers who wanted more expertise in this area, he said.
"About three years ago, probably only a tenth of our network specialised in this space, whereas now closer to a third of our advisers are specialists or are working to become specialists in aged care advice," Meldrum said.
"We've also built a great referral partnership with a separate business owned by the wider Australian Unity Group, Retirement Living Services, which has 15 retirement villages across Sydney and Melbourne, comprising 3000 residents.
"We think post industry reforms, having experts in this field will help us gain more traction as there are still a lot of elderly people who are sceptical about advice through things that happened as a consequence of the global financial crisis."
Meldrum said while a lot of AUPFS advisers across Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra were building expertise in aged care advice, the majority of demand was still coming out of Melbourne and Sydney.
