As financial planning dealer groups continue to conduct internal reviews of past planning practices and breach incidents, the industry must be ready to share this information with new entrants to help bolster the integrity of the profession, according to a leading academic.

Speaking to financialobserver, Deakin University associate professor and financial planning course director Adrian Raftery questioned whether universities could take part in internal dealer group reviews, as a way to engage students over the importance of ethics and quality advice provisioning.

He said it was important for universities to have more access to data emanating from such reviews as the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s (CBA’s) recently-completed Open Advice Review to ensure graduates could make more informed decisions about their careers when choosing a dealer group, as well as help further their knowledge of what constitutes good advice.

“I do think that universities could be involved in terms of the process or be considered to look at these sort of reviews,” Raftery told financialobserver.

“The benefits of doing that is that if they were involved, you could look at getting the students involved as well.

“They can see the pluses and minuses of good and bad advice … it could be a great learning tool for them to be able to see what went wrong and what quality advice looks like.”

Involving graduates in the process could help provide them with powerful insights into the advice industry today, ensuring that they were aware of what constituted advice malpractice, he added.

“If we can somehow show these mistakes to the future of advisers so they’re aware of it rather than falling in and making the same mistakes themselves it could be a very powerful tool for helping the next generation,” Raftery said.

The comments were first brought to light by Raftery in a LinkedIn post yesterday where he advocated in favour of greater collaboration between dealer groups and educational institutions to help safeguard the future of advice graduates.

“Seeing these figures and also hearing about other large dealer groups conducting their own internal reviews, what do you think about universities conducting these ‘fiercely independent’ reviews of files for dealer groups?” Raftery asked.

“[And] should students be allowed to observe these files as part of their own training?”

Original article published here in the Financial Observer on 21 June 2017