‘It was a dictatorship’: Former AMP planner tips bucket on troubled giant

A WHISTLEBLOWER has spoken about the tactics AMP used as the financial institution charged customers millions of dollars for nothing.

A FORMER AMP financial planner claims pressures to sell in-house AMP products — leaving some clients worse off — made him feel like “a puppet”, and eventually forced his resignation.

Brett Strong told ABC’s Four Corners program that AMP pushing to get him to sell their own products made him feel like “a corporate s**t; a b*tch to somebody’s command”.

Four Corners looked at AMP, which has acknowledged that from 2008 more than 15,000 customers had been charged more than $4.5 million in adviser fees.

“A puppet would be the best way to describe it,” he said.

Asked to describe his experience working with AMP, Mr Strong says: “The best way to describe that would be that it was a dictatorship.”

The claims were launched at AMP’s scandal-ridden financial planning business as part of the Four Corners investigation by Sean Nicholls examined how AMP could have such a spectacular fall from grace.

AMP is one of a number of financial institutions whose reputations are in tatters and are facing court action from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) in the wake of evidence to the Financial Services Royal Commission in April.

The royal commission revelations that AMP charged fees for no service and repeatedly misled the (ASIC) have seen AMP’s market value plunge, and the corporate giant also faces shareholder class action.

‘I HAVEN’T HEARD FROM ANYONE FROM AMP FOR 15 YEARS’

Mr Strong joined AMP in 2013 in an effort to expand his independent financial advice business, he told Four Corners.

Joining AMP’s network of licenced advisers as a self-employed representative of AMP — and getting access to AMP clients.

It meant he could widen his client base from about 700 to 2000 — that’s how many clients AMP gave him who no longer had an adviser.

But he says it came at a cost, with pressures to sell in-house AMP products even if it meant a client would be financially worse off.

‘A puppet would be the best way to describe it,’ says Brett Strong of working for AMP’s financial planning arm. Picture: ABC

“That didn’t sit well with me,” he says.

“Conflicted, uneasy, scared … none of these words are even close to describing how I felt at the time,” he said.

When he started contacting the 2000 clients on AMP’s books, it rapidly became obvious many of them had not heard from an AMP adviser for years, yet they were still charged monthly fees for advice and weren’t receiving “a red razoo”, he said.

“It didn’t matter how long you went back, that adviser fee was there monthly, being taken out of those super funds or those policies,” he said.

“To me, when you ring the client and they say, ‘Who are you, where you come from?’ And you tell them that you’re from AMP and they say, ‘Well I haven’t heard from anyone from AMP for 15 years, or 20 years when someone knocked on my door and sold me a policy’ — that to me, smells very, very bad. It made us feel very, very uncomfortable.

ASIC continues to investigate AMP, which has acknowledged that from 2008 more than 15,000 customers had been charged more than $4.5 million in adviser fees — despite the fact their financial planners had left the business, and not been replaced.

AMP says 3500 of the wrongly billed clients were deliberately charged fees for no service, while the rest were wrongly charged in error.

BREAKING POINT

Mr Strong claimed once he joined AMP, he was pressured to recommend AMP in-house products ahead of others available — regardless of the advice he sent to head office.

“Every time it came back, regardless of what I had put as an adviser, the product at the end of the advice or the structure was an AMP product,” Mr Strong says.

Breaking point came when AMP pressured him to sell an AMP product to a long-time client of his wanting to set up a self-managed retirement fund.

It would have left his client thousands of dollars a year worse off.

When Mr Strong refused, he was reprimanded by AMP managers, told he wasn’t fitting into the “AMP culture” and he was “not a very good adviser because I was not performing”.

“That was quite earth shattering,” he said.

“But it was like a weight had lifted off my shoulders. It was the best news I’d heard in a long, long time.”

That was the day he quit as an AMP adviser and handed back his AMP licence.

An AMP spokeswoman told Four Corners Mr Strong resigned in March 2014 after it notified him, “of compliance issues, including certain advice”.

She says his AMP authorisation was then “terminated” the following August, adding that AMP will review the claims made by Mr Strong to Four Corners.

In hindsight, Mr Strong said he was naive to join AMP.

“Somebody above me was always going to pull my strings and I was too naive to realise it, or I was too blinded by the incentives,” he said.

“To be told you’re no good at something because you didn’t sell or pressure a client into selling, or buying a product … no … I wouldn’t entertain the idea of working with these people again.”

Money For Nothing on Four Corners can be seen on ABC TV’s iview.

Originally published as ‘It was a dictatorship’: Former AMP planner tips bucket on troubled giant