Dealer group Professional Investment Services (PIS) is in talks to sign a joint venture agreement with a third party financial institution to build a new wrap and banking product.
“We are in the business of building some products as a joint venture company that will be able to distribute banking product,” PIS chief executive Robbie Bennetts told InvestorDaily.
The new product will not be issued under PIS’s banking license but by the unnamed third party, though the dealer group will be sharing in the profits of firm that is running those products, Bennetts said.
PIS’s decision to develop a range of in-house white label product comes in response to the proposed changes to Australia’s financial services regulation.
“Under all the new fiduciary obligations, no matter what we recommend or touch if they are talking about it being five years or 10 years or 15 years out and we’re still responsible for it we need to then very carefully consider what products we’re going to be using,” he said.
“The only way that we can see that we are really going to protect our people and ourselves is to offer a broader range, in-house white label product.”
Bennetts said the banking product is only the first phase of development for the dealer, with a new platform also on the cards.
“We have someone who has banking product, in the middle we have distribution and the [third party] is building the new wealth management structure. Of course it won’t be the only platform that we use,” he said.
PIS has been developing the new banking product and wrap for the past 15 months.
The new product expects to be released in the 2010 quarter, with an absolute deadline to market being April, 2010, Bennetts said.
The new product will be available to PIS’s network of advisers, he said.
