freedom for your financial planning business
about us
there must be a better way
Advice Evolution is a boutique Australian Financial Services Licensee (AFSL), with a growing national footprint of high-quality financial advisers.
Founded by three highly experienced and successful financial advisers with a passion for autonomy, Advice Evolution was created to allow financial advisers to have a greater contribution in how their future destiny is determined.
We are a collective group of professional advisers sharing a core set of values and beliefs that drive our thinking. Our future is founded on four core pillars:
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No Mandates: We don't mandate above the financial services regulations.
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No Conflicts: We are conflict-free.
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Control & Equity: Advisers are the key to our license. AE advisers gain an opportunity to participate in the ownership of the license after 12 months.
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Trust: We trust you. We maintain full transparency between advisers and the licensee.
We seek self-directed, ethical, and ambitious professional advisers who want a better way of running their own businesses free from the interference and bias of an institution. If this sounds like you we’d welcome the opportunity to share our vision and offer with you in confidence.
our story
Advice Evolution was founded in 2012 by three partners, financial planners David Harris, Grant Simpson and Anthony Stedman.
Throughout the last decade they had each built and managed a successful and profitable financial advisory businesses licensed under a major bank-owned Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL) holder.
David, Grant and Anthony built their practices on strategic advice and quality service to personal clients. They had each become successful and respected at their licensee, sought out for their advice and support by peers and senior management. In 2010 all three were asked to join the advisory board representing the interests of financial advisers at the licensee.
From this privileged position they were privy to the details of how large, institutionally-owned licensees manage and advance their own interests, including influencing adviser choice of products on the Approved Product List, an overbearing attitude to compliance standards and privately retaining rebates from product providers without full transparency from the very people who created the income in the first place, the advisers.
This experience opened their eyes to the frustrations and limitations of running a business within a bank-owned licensee. Over a long and deeply thought-provoking discussion at dinner one evening they agreed there must be a better way to run an advice business, a fairer way to share in the economic value they created as a group of financial advisers and to have a greater say in how they ran their business and delivered great advice to clients at a reasonable price, while always maintaining high levels of compliant advice.
From the passion of creating a better model to help like-minded advisers build a quality advice business on their own terms, Advice Evolution was born.
However, breaking away from the incentives and ties of a large licensee wasn’t easy. As David Harris said: “Once you turn to confront the deepest concerns about compromise, lack of control and freedom from an institution, there’s no turning back. The road to freedom of choice takes on its own energy and direction.”