ING manager research team gets own ASIC licence

The ING Advice manager research team lead by Margaret Callinan is being spun off into a separately-licenced company, Financial Facts, which will attempt to sell its services to non-ING dealer groups.

The chief executive of ING Advice, Colin Morgan, said Callinan’s eight-person team received its ASIC licence last week, and was ready to market its portfolio modelling and manager research services externally, concentrating on smaller dealer groups. “;We suspect it’s groups at the smaller end who’d be interested in the holistic Financial Facts service,”; he said, adding that larger groups might consider using the team for research on a single asset class. Morgan said any revenue stream from sales to external dealer groups was “;not the major reason”; behind the formation of Financial Facts, but rather the importance of independent advice in the present regulatory environment. “;RetireInvest and the other ING dealer groups will remain the dominant clients of Financial Facts, but we thought it was important for their approved lists and advice to come from an arms-length, genuinely independent source,”; Morgan said. Financial Facts will have its own board and its own profit-and-loss statement, however Callinan will continue to report to Morgan, and it will remain housed in ING’s Kent St headquarters “;for now”; Morgan said. The Financial Facts business was expected to be cost-neutral initially, however Morgan noted there was “;not exactly a massive foray into research at present, you’ve got institutions selling off their research arms”;, so he’d concluded it was “;a good time to put some skills out there”;. Financial Facts will be Morgan’s sixth ING-owned but separately-licenced report, on top of the four dealer groups – RetireInvest, Tandem, Millenium 3 and ING Financial Plannning – and SMSF service provider Superconcepts.