The holding company of Professional Investment Services (PIS) is examining ways to buy back the shareholding its financial advisers hold in its superannuation platform, in a bid to clean up any perceived conflict of interest concerns.
Late last month PIS’s holding company, Professional Investment Holdings (PIH), began discussions on how to buy back the adviser shares in its Mentor Investment Services (Mentor) platform.
“When we had the introduction of the conflict of interest guidelines and we agreed to put them in from an FPA perspective, we stopped people from being able to get further shareholding,” PIS managing director Grahame Evans said.
“What we’re looking to do now is we’re looking at ways to buy the shareholding back so they are no longer shareholders in that business and it just actually cleans it up from our perspective.
“It takes any doubt from a conflict perspective out of it as well. It’s basically a clean-up mechanism for it.”
The buy-back decision was not part of a plan to close Mentor or sever Mentor’s relationship with its administrator, Oasis Asset Management, Evans said.
