As the man who lent his name to the parliamentary inquiry that led to Labor’s landmark Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) reforms, former federal MP Bernie Ripoll is synonymous with that sector’s transformation from an industry to a profession.
His report into the scandalous practices of now-defunct financial planning outfit Storm Financial, and many others, paved the way for a decade of regulatory change, including a ban on investment commissions and introduction of a fiduciary duty for advisers.
Ten years after FoFA, Ripoll is proud of his role in ushering in new consumer protections and cultural change in the advice industry. But he also says the glaring national priority surrounding advice is no longer focused on improving the quality of services.
“The biggest problem we’ve got today is not the problems of old, it’s the new problems. It is, ‘how do you get advice to super fund members if your super fund has more than a million members?’,” Ripoll tells Retirement Magazine.
The comment reflects the bipartisanship that has emerged around the goal of broadening access to affordable financial advice. The previous Coalition government led by Scott Morrison – acting on a recommendation of the Hayne royal commission – instigated a review of the laws and regulations surrounding advice.
However, despite the title of the Quality of Advice Review (QAR), that government also arguably narrowed the terms of reference to focus more on the commercial considerations around access to advice, rather than the quality of services provided or consumer protections inherent.
Nonetheless, upon its election in May 2022, the Albanese Labor Government re-committed to the project and kept in place the previous government’s chosen reviewer, Michelle Levy, a partner at blue-chip commercial law firm Allens. Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones made clear the new government agreed with Ripoll’s assessment that ensuring workers could access advice was a priority.

Underpinning this policy impetus was the demographic challenge of a rapidly ageing population and retiring workforce. We are in the midst of an unprecedented transition, with an estimated 5 million Australians expected to retire between 2021 and 2027.
And yet, despite the veneer of bipartisanship, as the government approaches the end of its first term, the vast bulk of Levy’s recommendations remain unlegislated, fighting for a place in what the government has called an “ambitious” Treasury portfolio agenda.
In July 2024, Parliament passed the first piece of legislation as part of the government’s Delivering Better Financial Outcomes (DBFO) agenda, acting on the findings of the recommendations of the QAR. The legislation removed the requirement for financial advisers to issue fee disclosure statements to clients and clarified procedures around the deduction of advice fees from superannuation funds.
But it stopped short of introducing some of the flagship QAR recommendations aimed at assisting funds to provide more advice to members, such as the introduction of a new category of “qualified adviser” for simple advice to members and relief from satisfying the so-called safe-harbour steps of the FoFA best interests duty.
Until these measures are enacted, funds will remain cautious about providing much guidance to members around their financial lives, for fear of triggering the complex advice laws.
Personal advice pickle
A High Court ruling in 2019, in a dispute between Westpac and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (note 1) determined that super funds should be considered as giving “personal” financial advice wherever there is a reasonable customer expectation that advice is what is being provided.
Since then, super funds have been doubly cautious about extracting any information from members which may add to that presumption of personal advice, which is effectively a high-level professional service and uneconomic to provide to many regular members with relatively simple financial affairs. Many have restricted their use of tools such as nudges or retirement calculators or shut down or streamlined their inbound and outbound call-centre operations.
These outcomes have arguably not been in the interests of the millions approaching retirement, who plainly need answers to their questions about this life transition. But it has also presented a new risk for superannuation trustees, who by law must now play a more active role in assisting their members prepare for retirement.
Separate to its instigation of the QAR, the Morrison government legislated a Retirement Income Covenant (RIC), obliging funds to develop an appropriate retirement income strategy for their members. Regulators have said repeatedly they are dissatisfied with the progress of funds in meeting their obligations under this new covenant, with research suggesting far too many members still feel unprepared for retirement.
The covenant as legislated does not explicitly state that a fund must provide financial advice to members in order to meet these obligations. But when it comes to communicating the retirement income strategies to members, many experts believe providing advice is a practical corollary of the law.
Levy, who has now returned to private practice following her year-long deep-dive into the advice laws, says it is difficult to fathom how retirement strategies can be effectively deployed without some form of personalised advice.
“Retirement I don’t think is well-suited to ‘collective treatment’ in the same way that investing is,” Levy tells Retirement Magazine. “Pooling is important to investment returns, but … is at odds with the intention really behind the retirement income covenant. It’s a real tension for trustees and the system.”

The practice of “cohorting”, in which super funds break their memberships down into smaller groups based on relatively homogeneous demographics or circumstances, will always be inferior to tailored advice that takes personal circumstances into account, Levy says. It may even result in consumer harm when applied incorrectly.
“It [cohorting] is a poor substitute for individual advice, but it’s the best that funds can do with the law as it stands,” she says.
She describes the omission of an explicit advice provision mandate as a “shortcoming” in the RIC’s drafting. But it is one that it is effectively moot, she says, given funds have a separate obligation to act in the best financial interests of their members.
“[Not giving advice] is not necessarily consistent with acting in the financial interests of members to implement something that doesn’t have regard to the individual needs of members,” she says.
The tension Levy outlines serves as an implicit argument for the implementation of her recommendations, which are widely supported across the often-fractured financial services industry. Although the recommendations are opposed in part by consumer advocates, who harbour fears that opening new pathways to advice for corporates may result in the kind of cross-subsidisation and product sales activity that featured heavily during the testimony of the royal commission.
The concerns of these activists, especially Choice and the affiliated Super Consumers Australia, has played at least some role in the lengthy consultation process and legislative delays, given they are an influential constituent for a Labor government and given there is broad consensus in the industry.
Advice inflection point
The growing regulator and public expectation that super funds will play a larger role in the provision of retirement advice reflects a profound (though perhaps inevitable) shift in the traditional value proposition of the superannuation system.
Since its hard-won inception almost 40 years ago, the super industry has excelled at developing cost-effective solutions to help members maximise accumulation of savings over their working lives.
For a large part of that same period, delivering advice to Australians on how to create income in retirement was largely the domain of a separate and distinct financial advice industry.
While that industry traces its roots back to the days of the old life insurance agent, the modern profession was created by a steady stream of retirees receiving lump sum benefits from the then-nascent super funds and then seeking advice on how to invest it – often literally turning up to an adviser’s office on the first day of retirement clutching a cheque issued by their super fund.
Artefacts of that history can be seen even today. For example, RI Advice, which was owned by ANZ and then Insignia Financial before being spun out as part of Rhombus Advisory, takes its name from a business set up by John Blewitt in 1979: RetireInvest.
The advice and superannuation industries tracked these parallel and separate paths for many years – super funds taking care of accumulation, advisers taking care of retirement.
But as the superannuation industry matured, and the regulatory environment changed dramatically in the years before and after the seminal Hayne royal commission, these paths inevitably began to converge.
Both sectors are now arguably at an inflection point, as super funds are called on to focus more on retirement, and the advice industry around the world is turning attention to a new generation of wealth accumulators as millions of Millennial and Generation Z investors have become participants in financial markets via low-cost technology platforms and exchange-traded funds since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The system is now crying out for a more nuanced and collaborative approach to advice provision depending on the level of complexity attached to the individual or household in question. The development of a triage system akin to the healthcare industry would reflect a common-sense outcome for retirement advice, with in-house advisers at funds or other financial institutions able to provide simple or digital advice under the regulations attached to the new Levy-recommended category; and a referrals system in place to either employed, aligned or external professional personal advisers for more complex advice needs.
A heated history
A handful of funds are already travelling in this direction, expanding in their relationships with professional advisers and investing in their adviser-facing portals. But the prospect of a more collaborative ecosystem remains plagued by a fractious history.
Through the 2000s and early 2010s the relationship between the advice industry and the profit-to-member sector of the superannuation was characterised by deep mistrust, if not outright hostility. For their part, industry funds accused advisers of encouraging members to quit the low-cost haven of industry funds to join relatively higher-cost retail super funds in pursuit of product sales commissions.
Advisers of a certain age well remember an industry fund campaign against commissions paid to advisers; this was widely interpreted by the advice community as a clear anti-adviser message.
Advisers, on the other hand, mistrusted the links between industry funds and trade unions, and argued that their clients were often demonstrably better off in retail funds, where the standard of service was higher and where a greater range of investment options existed. Both sides had at least some evidence underlying their emotive arguments.
“I would generally agree with the theory that there was a bit of a war raging, industry funds against advisers,” says Ripoll.
“There was this sort of general perception that was being perpetrated to the outside world of the ‘dodgy adviser’.”
Ripoll says that once that label stuck, it was difficult to shake. It “created a really difficult place for advisers to exist, and for super funds and for other people and for the community to look at it in any other light”, he says.

“Certainly, at the core of all of that, it would be hard to argue against the fact that commissions incentivised a particular type of behaviour which, if we’re going to be polite, wasn’t ideal,” he says.
Echoes of the dormant conflicts emerged earlier this year when the newly established Super Members Council – a lobby group for profit-to-member super funds born out of the merger of Industry Super Australia and the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees – issued a public statement referencing “dodgy advisers”.
The fact that the organisation’s chief executive, Misha Schubert, chose to apologise for the comments, however, is perhaps a sign that the tension has thawed. Ripoll says the super industry should acknowledge the professionalisation of advice.
“Even though today there’s half the number of advisers [than there were in 2017], they’re very much more professional,” he says.
“The standards are super high; the education levels are super high; now they all have to do ethics courses. It’s really changed. It’s just not the same world – you can’t even compare them.”
Solid and sound alignment
Today there is broad alignment between the fiduciary duties of super fund trustees and the best interest duty of financial advisers, Ripoll says.
“You might recall we stopped short of going down the pathway of requiring a fiduciary requirement, we all needed to be sensible about this,” he says. “It’s a really good, solid and sound alignment now.”
There is alignment, too, in the promise of efficiencies gained, not just via possible legal reform, but technological innovation. Ripoll – who, full disclosure, was previously chair and remains a director and shareholder of digital advice provider Otivo – says digital iterations of financial advice must logically be part of the solutions.
“What we want is more advice on a regular basis for cheaper and cheaper and cheaper,” he says. “It can only be provided in a digital format; it can’t be all done by humans on the phone. That’s preposterous.”
The experience of super funds may be instructive to that end. Waves of regulation, especially the introduction of the Your Future Your Super performance test alongside the best financial interest duty, have pushed investment fees in the super system on a downward trajectory.
“The power of numbers and the ability to use technology means super fund fees are fantastically low and getting lower,” Ripoll says. “And I think advice needs to be the same.”
Levy agrees that technological developments present a potential pathway for funds to meet the growing demand for advice, irrespective of what happens (or does not happen) in Canberra.
“There is more and more ability to give personal advice which is in the best interests of consumers and trustees’ members, through more data, through better technology, and even AI,” she says.
However, Levy says it is understandable that super funds are hesitant to experiment with these emerging technologies, given they operate in a highly regulated and politically sensitive environment. “If you’re not a fiduciary it becomes a bit easier to take a risk,” she concedes.
That leaves the solution to the widely acknowledged social problem of access to advice largely in the hands of policymakers. Minister Jones has said he still intends for the Parliament to legislate the more substantive elements of DBFO before the next election, although has described the project as a “narrow path”.
In August, The Sydney Morning Herald detailed 12 big policy ideas the government was scrambling put before the Parliament over the final six sitting weeks of its first term. Financial advice reform was not among them.
Levy – who handed her final report to government almost two years ago now – declines to comment on the legislative timeline, saying it is a matter for government.
But she admits she does have concerns that the government’s response to her report will “not be sufficient” or will retain too much of the red tape she sought to ameliorate, or even counterintuitively add more regulation.
“Every time you add more rules, it just gets harder and harder and harder [to provide advice to consumers] and people are less inclined to do it.”
Notes:
- The High Court subsequently upheld an appeal by Westpac. Westpac Securities Administration Ltd v Australian Securities and Investments Commission (HCA 3). High Court of Australia, 2021.
Conexus Financial, publisher of Retirement Magazine, will be hosting a national conversation about superannuation advice at the inaugural Advice Policy Summit at Old Parliament House, Canberra, on 10-11 February.