The Top 100 Financial Advisers List sees big firms the winners

Leading wealth management firms have scooped the pool in Barron’s 2023 list of Australia’s 100 Top Financial Advisers.

Garth Hu, Andrew Dunbar and Adam Stanley are the leading three on this year’s The Deal/Barron’s: TOP 100 Financial Advisers.

The leading wealth management firms, Morgan Stanley, Pitcher Partners and Macquarie Private Bank, have scooped the pool in Barron’s 2023 list of Australia’s 100 Top Financial Advisers, taking six of the 10 top rankings.
Garth Hu, an executive director at Morgan Stanley’s Melbourne practice, was rated in the top position – the fourth year in a row that he has topped the list.

The number two placing was taken by Andrew Dunbar of Apt Wealth Partners, retaining the rank he achieved last year; and the third spot was taken by Pitcher Partner’s Adam Stanley, who moved up from number five in 2022. His colleague Charlie Viola, who has featured highly in the list over its seven-year history, comes in at number four – his same ranking last year.

The Barron’s list published in The Deal magazine in The Australian on Thursday, is recognised as a guide to consumers and a scorecard for advisers to measures themselves against.

Garth Hu. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

The 2023 list comes at a time when the industry is under pressure because of the exit of thousands of advisers in the wake of the Hayne royal commission into financial services and demands for higher educational qualifications. In an effort to meet the shortfall, the federal government is pushing superannuation funds to step up and begin advising members many of whom can no longer afford or cannot access independent financial advice.

In an exclusive interview with The Deal, the Minister for Financial Services, Stephen Jones, said that the superfunds could not hide behind any legal obstacles to giving advice and must “get their data up to speed” so they could help their members as they moved into retirement.

“There is a lot more that super funds can be doing and a lot more we want them to be doing,” he said.

Also in the magazine, Allens lawyer Michelle Levy, who ran the government’s Quality of Advice Review, writes that the responsibility for advice should not fall solely on the super funds and should instead be shared across all financial institutions.

And the industry is also grappling with how advisers can use artificial intelligence, such as the ChatGPT bot, to assist in some areas of process and advice.

The seventh annual list confirms last year’s trend to consolidation of the market at the top end where many advisers mandate that investors have at least between $1m to $5m to invest.

And the list also features a number of “partner pairs” – where two partners have the same ranking because in Barron’s view they share equal responsibility for the operation.

This year there are six pairs, which means there are 106 people listed in the 100 spots.

The leading pair are Bernie Connolly and Patrick Regan of Morgan Stanley, who are at 10 – down slightly from their number 9 slot last year.

Another trend confirmed this year – which is one that many in the industry lament – is the low number of women in the Top 100. There are only 12 women this year, down from 17 in 2022.

Bernie Connoll. Picture: Britta Campion

Matthew Barthel, the American editor responsible for the annual list, told The Australian that the country’s financial advisers seem to still be operating under heavy regulation that potentially limits the scope and quality of advice.

Commenting on the sector, Mr Barthel, who is executive editor, Dow Jones Wealth and Asset Management, said: “The onerous regulatory burdens on advisers are probably hindering advisers from doing their best work and serving the widest array of clients.”

But he said that under the regulatory overhaul in the wake of the Hayne royal commission into financial services, the federal government seemed to have done an important job of hitting the reset button for the way financial advice is delivered and consumed.

“It has paved the way for the industry to be populated by a more consistently high-quality of adviser,” he said. “This is an important development in a country where very few consumers get professional financial advice.”

And he stressed that the US also suffered under plenty of “regulatory confusions and contradictions”.

Mr Barthel said the most important trend in wealth management both here and in the US was the rise of teams of advisers.

“The industry was once organised around solo practitioners – advisers who served clients one-on-one and worked with small support staffs,” he said.

“Now advisers are building teams of experts to provide clients with a wider array of services. Teams also have the ability to operate more efficiently and to endure beyond the departure of any one team member, ensuring clients are not left in a lurch.

“In the 20 years that Barron’s has done financial adviser rankings, it’s been true that a handful of advisers tend to become fixtures at the top end of the lists, and this is likely to continue, as these advisers build out teams that offer more consistency and staying power to their businesses.

“The Top 100 lists also tend to see quite a bit of new blood each year, usually in the 20-25 per cent range.

“So usually it’s a healthy mixture of consistency and new players. In the coming years, we’d expect to see even more movement, as younger advisers make headway in an industry that’s seen many of the more experienced players depart in recent years.”

The dominance of men in the sector is obvious here and the US, with women comprising between 20-25 per cent of the industry in both markets, he said.

“There are signs this is changing, but, honestly, it’s mystifying how stubbornly this has remained the case,” Mr Barthel said. “The last two decades have seen concerted efforts in both places to expand the number of women advisers, and the growth of teams might end up being the mechanism that encourages the acceleration of this trend.”

See the full list of the Top 100 Financial Advisers in The Deal/Barron’s magazine on Thursday.