That’s according to PAA compliance adviser Angi Mann, who held a workshop at last week’s conference on documentation for mortgage advisers.
She said advisers should have strategies in place to regularly check in with their clients and reassess their needs if required.
“Otherwise, where will the client go at the end of their fixed-rate period, when the bank sends them a renewal letter? If you don’t call them, they’re going to call the bank.”
Mann said mortgage advisers needed to ensure they had a papertrail covering all the advice they had given clients, even if the legislation did not dictate that registered financial advisers had to.
“Just because it doesn’t say that you need to record everything, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”
She said, for every client, an adviser should have a disclosure statement, a scope of engagement, a fact-finding document, information on research and the rationale for recommendations, a statement of advice and an agreement to proceed.
Mann said it was as important that clients were clear what an adviser was not advising on as what they were.
Advisers at the workshop were sceptical about whether the level of paperwork described was feasible but Mann said they could do a lot of it by keeping records of emails.
She recommended getting both clients to sign documents, or sending an email to both of them, if an adviser was dealing with a couple.
