Dealer group Hillross Financial Services intends to grow its network significantly during 2010 and will also concentrate on fostering more relationships between financial planning practices and external accounting groups, acting head of Hillross Ray Djani has said.
"We're looking to grow practice scale as well as practice numbers nationwide and have identified Queensland as a key growth area as well as Western Australia, where we currently don't have as many points of representation as we would like to," Djani told InvestorDaily.
"We don't have a definite figure of how many practices we would like to add but we do want to grow significantly, and we're particularly looking at practices that are already well established, which have fast-growing potential, and those that service a more affluent client base."
Djani said Hillross grew its practice numbers by 10 per cent last year and that its merger and acquisitions program had largely contributed to the figure.
"A lot of practices that join Hillross want to acquire an exiting Hillross practice or on occasion merge with another Hillross practice, so the program makes that a smoother process," he said.
"We also want to help our practices to build more referral relationships and joint ventures with accountants, as more often these days clients want to be able to access more services through the one firm."
Djani said Hillross had 109 practices currently and owned nine additional former Rabo Financial Advisors businesses located in Rabobank branches.
He said as Rabobank had 50 branches and occupied a lot of regional Australia, there was also an opportunity to add financial planning services to more branches or alternatively set up cross-referral relationships with nearby Hillross advisers.
Djani said no announcements about who would take the head position at Hillross had yet been made.
