[Weekly Wrap] DIM sins

It's been DIMS week. Firstly we had Commerce Minister Craig Foss releasing the cabinet decisions on the future of DIMS - including some changes. A couple of days later the FMA rolled out its guidance notes.

Friday, June 20th 2014, 11:59AM

For many in the investment advisory world the future of DIMS is critical to the future shape of their business, as it is to many of the fund managers who are prepared to work with IFAs.

If I had to sum up the week's developments it would be like this. The FMA has listened to what people were saying about DIMS. To its credit it acknowledged that if one of the outcomes of DIMS was to drive small advisers to the big end of town, and remove a choice from consumers, then that would be a bad outcome.

We also reported during the week that the draft guidance document was concerning. We understand the final document was changed significantly and resulted in something which was more useful to advisers.

An over-riding concern though is how fixated government and the FMA have become thanks to one person. David Ross.

This fixation was described by one person who commented onGood Returns, that they had become anal about Ross. Another, very senior, AFA said to me the other day that it would have been relatively easy to address the issues without the "overkill" regulations which have resulted from Ross.

And the MBIE regulatory impact statement is revealing in how it refers to other cases with DIMS, but doesn't name them.

Everyone has to live with the fallout from Ross. The decisions this week appear to have been well-received by the industry although there still remains many questions.

This piece, where we talked to the FMA about its guidance notes, has been useful in helping advisers understand the changes.

As an aside one of things this industry is excelling at is developing acroynoms and putting complexity into its rules. We now have a new form of DIMS (Contingency DIMS) and trying to explain that some DIMS are licences under the FMC Act and others are authorisations under the Financial Advisers Act is pretty darn difficult.

The complexity doesn't stop there either. Trying to draw a line between personal and class DIMS seems to me to be bloody difficult. It reminds me of another similar issue. What an RFA can say about KiwiSaver without crossing into AFA territory?

The idea of KISS - keep it simple - is clearly something which has been lost. No wonder some people are losing passion about what they do.

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