Advice Fee Form

Following the introduction of the Delivering Better Financial Outcomes and Other Measures Act 2024, effective 10 January 2025, we’ve updated our advice fee consent forms to meet the new legislative requirements. 

The following changes to our forms apply to all fee arrangements:

• To meet the new regulatory requirements, our forms now capture the cost of advice, in addition to the costs that will be deducted from a client’s account.
• We’ve added a section for you to input services for IDPS accounts which will help you meet your requirements if you wish to rely on one form for your clients only.

We’ll continue to allow for starting advice fees up to 60 days in advance.

In addition, we’ve made the following changes for ongoing fee arrangements, in line with the new legislative requirements:

• The ‘anniversary date’ for each ongoing fee arrangement has been replaced by a ‘reference date’. There is additional flexibility to allow the setting of a reference date that is sooner than the default one year.
• The renewal period for ongoing fee arrangements has been updated so they can only be renewed between 60 days before and 150 days after the reference date. 
   

What is ‘cost of advice’?

New laws require you to disclose the amount to be paid for the advice and the amount to be charged against the account to your client.

Cost of advice is the cost to your client for the advice per the fee arrangement. This may be the same as the amount to be charged against your client’s account.

However, there are also cases where these amounts may differ. For example:

• You may choose to directly invoice your client so that only a portion of the advice fees under your arrangement is charged against the Wrap account.
• You may split fees under your arrangement across multiple Wrap accounts.

If the amounts are the same there will be an option within the online form to use the same figure for both.
 

How has the renewal period changed?

The renewal period for existing fee arrangements has changed to 60 days before the reference date and 150 days after.

If you or your client can’t renew your arrangement during this period, you can let the current arrangement expire and terminate, or you can start a new arrangement and specify a reference date during a period in which you and your client can renew the arrangement. If you start a new ongoing or fixed-term arrangement on an account, any prior ongoing or fixed-term fee arrangements on that account will terminate.

If you need to change any material details in your fee arrangement, this will require you to start a new arrangement, which will terminate the existing arrangement.
 

What does the change from ‘anniversary date’ to ‘reference date’ mean?

The previous ‘anniversary date’ has been replaced by a ‘reference date’. The key difference is that the reference date is flexible and can be selected by you and your client provided it’s a date that’s earlier than the default date, being either one year from the start date of the arrangement, or the reference date specified in the previous consent for the arrangement (where applicable).

This means you can change the next reference date to be any day within 365 days of the current ‘reference date’ (or start date). This gives you greater flexibility to change the next reference date to align with your client’s other existing fee arrangements or to a time of year that’s more convenient.
 

What forms are impacted?

Any form where an advice fee is instructed is impacted. This includes:

• Wrap applications
• Adviser fee forms.
   

Is there a transition period?

To ensure a smooth transition, we recommend using the new consent forms from Friday 10 January (particularly if the anniversary or start date of the arrangement is on or after 10 January 2025). 

If you’ve already started the consent process (either for new or existing fee arrangements), or your existing fee arrangement is due to expire soon, please refer to the table below to see how they will be treated.

We've outlined the new requirements for all forms below:

What will happen if I start a form after 10 January?

From 10 January 2025, all new applications and advice fee forms have been updated to help you meet your requirements.
 

Where can I find more information?

For additional information on the new requirements, please refer to the ASIC website.

The Advice Fee Form is used to renew, add, update or remove advice fees on any account type (superannuation, pension, Fiduciary or IDPS). The online form can be used to set advice fees on an account that calculates on the balance of the account or the balance of the fee group. For retail clients, it also captures the advice fee consent requirements that apply where personal advice is provided under an ongoing fee arrangement.

Where your fees are not changing and you're renewing an ongoing fee deducted from an IDPS account, you can upload your own advice fee consent document into the Advice Fee Form. Our Advice Fee Deduction Consent Form will not be sent to the client as you have already collected consent.

The Advice Fee Form must be used for all advice fees deducted from superannuation accounts to ensure there is a valid consent in place before fees are deducted. Further information on trustee obligations in relation to advice fees and superannuation is set out in this letter from ASIC/APRA to trustees. 

The legislation requires all account owners to provide their consent.

The Advice Fee Form, the product application forms and the product switch form will include a number of services, which advisers must include when requesting client consent to deduct fees from their superannuation or pension account.

For superannuation accounts, these services are:

• Periodic review of a superannuation account
• Strategic superannuation advice
• Management and administration of a superannuation account
  • Superannuation investment portfolio:
  • establishment and implementation
  • review and maintenance
  • corporate actions
• Superannuation contribution strategy
• Insurance in superannuation strategy
• Superannuation withdrawal advice and management.

For pension accounts, these services are:

• Pension establishment and commencement
• Periodic review of a pension account
• Pension management strategy
• Management and administration of a pension account
• Pension investment portfolio:
  • establishment and implementation
  • review and maintenance
  • corporate actions.

These service lists were developed after discussions with a number of financial adviser and dealer firms. While they may not align exactly to your current service offering, we’ve kept the service descriptions broad so they can fit alongside most adviser service offerings.

After submitting the Advice Fee Form, your client will receive an email from us to their registered email address.

An example of the email your client will receive is shown below:

After clicking on the Review fees and services button, your client will be taken to a login page where they will log in using personal information registered with us.

Your client will then be asked to view the Advice Fee Deduction Consent document and accept the terms and conditions.

Please note, your client won’t be able to approve and submit their consent until they’ve viewed the Advice Fee Deduction Consent form.

They can view the form by clicking the View Advice Fee Deduction Consent link on the page. Once downloaded, your client will be able to open the PDF. It should appear in the bottom left-hand side of the screen.

Your client should then select Approve and submit your consent or Save request for later if they have any questions they'd like to confirm with you prior to submitting their consent.

Where the client selects Decline request for consent the Advice Fee Deduction Consents will appear in the Declined tab of the portal (see left-hand column).

Please check the Submitted and Declined tab regularly to stay up to date on the status of your clients' Advice Fee Deduction Consent forms.

You can view In-progress applications under the In-progress tab of the application work-in-progress screen in Adviser Online.

Simply select the application and click Edit to re-send the email to your client. 

When completing the Advice Fee Form, you can select ‘Print, Sign and Upload’. This enables the form to be generated as a PDF and printed out or emailed to the client. The PDF can also be executed using approved e-signature providers.

Once logged in to Adviser Online, please follow the below steps to cancel a submitted application form:  

1. Select Applications from the left-hand column and click on Pending applications 
2. Click the Submitted tab 
3. Locate the correct consent and select cancel in the last column 
4. You’ll then be prompted to reconfirm that you would like to cancel the request, prior to the cancellation being processed 
5. Once cancelled, you can view a record of the cancellation in the completed tab. 

To remove an adviser service fee from an account, please use the Advice Fee Form. The Advice Fee Form can be completed online by an adviser or support staff.  

Once you’ve selected the relevant account within the portal, confirm you’d like to cancel an existing fee by selecting this option from the drop-down box in Stage 1. Once confirmed, the Advice Fee Form will display a message, confirming the existing consent will be invalidated and adviser service fees removed from the account upon submission of the Advice Fee Form.  

Once submitted, adviser service fees will be removed from the account. If you remove fees in the middle of a month, fees for that month will not be deducted from the account at the end of the month. 

Please keep in mind that if your fee arrangement was set to calculate on a group balance, this may impact the fees you receive.

The account must have adviser service fees loaded on the last day of the month for advice fees to calculate for that month. This means where the expiry date or the end date on the Advice Fee Form falls on any day prior to the last day of the month, adviser service fees for that month will not be deducted from the account.