Well before the Hayne Royal Commission, the financial services industry had been faced with the need for increasingly high standards around financial advice, and the need for that advice to be not conflicted. DFS is amongst relatively few firms who moved ahead many years ago to ensure that it exceeded all ethical expectations around non-biased or non-conflicted investment advice, fee and cost transparency, comprehensive services across all classes of investment and deep professional skills and knowledge in all of the fields of knowledge required. Unfortunately, the recent Royal Commission exposed, among other things, the continuing operation of financial advisory services operating as an extension of firms manufacturing investment funds and vehicles – and therefore conflicted in their willingness and ability to provide fully independent advice to clients.

For us, DFS stands amongst relatively few firms in the full and independent advice space. We nor DFS were impacted by the Hayne report.

Hugh Davies