Commonwealth Bank of Australia-owned dealer group Count Financial (Count) continues to revise its advice offering to fortify its adviser and practice numbers.
"We've lost a few financial advisers and that's never a good thing," Count chief executive David Lane told InvestorDaily in answer to the questions over its advisers being poached by BT Financial Group.
"In the scheme of things, we've lost fewer advisers than we've brought in over the course of the year."
Count's long-term goal comes down to ensuring that its authorised representatives are provided with the best products and services, which will strengthen adviser retention, Lane said.
"We're going through our entire service offering to ensure that it is best of breed," he said.
"A combination of that and the unique position we have, which is typically focused on accounting-driven financial advisers, puts us in a terrific position."
Last week, Count announced it had added nine practices and 24 authorised representatives during June. It now has about 600 advisers operating out of 300 practices.
The dealer group also appointed Judy Clark into the role of senior executive responsible for practice development in April, of which a key responsibility will be a 12-month coaching program for all new firms.
In addition, it has approved another five hires to its adviser development team, Lane said.
"We're taking a regionally-based approach so in addition to having a Queensland-based business development managers (BDM), we're going to cover the southern states out of Victoria with a senior hire there and extra hires into the Sydney office as well," he said.
"One of the great things about having a beefed up BDM team is that we can give advisers better coverage and better support."
Count is in productive negotiations to reduce platform pricing, having already cut down the pricing on a number of products.
Count is always on the lookout to expand its network, Lane said.
"Particularly over the past six months as we've been able to revise our service offering, we're generating more and more interest. I'm very positive about the coming year ahead," he said.
