Obtaining consent for OFAs
Furthermore, under the Bill, they must now obtain written consent from their clients under an ongoing fee arrangement, before fees can be deducted from the client’s account.
Are you ready?
The legislation comes into effect for ongoing fee arrangements established after 1 July 2021. And for ongoing fee arrangements that come into force before 1 July 2021, transitional provisions will apply.
So for most product providers and advice firms, it will be crucial that they manage the transition in a manner which drives productivity, rather than hinders it. This means finding the right technological solution to support their advisers.
Supporting advisers through digital compliance
Praemium has been providing digital consent, through its managed account application acceptance functionality, for years now. And together with our clients, we have been working on new tools to support advisers in meeting their client consent obligations.
With the latest enhancement to our digital acceptance experience, advisers have the ability to send their clients any advice document, including a Fee Disclosure Statement, directly to their clients’ Investor Portal for online digital consent.
Advisers can trigger an automated email, notifying the client that their consent is required. The client can then submit their approval via Investor Portal, which is registered with an approval receipt provided to the adviser.
All documentation is stored in Investor Portal, so both the adviser and investor have access to all correspondence, resulting in increased transparency for clients and a compliance audit trail for advisers.
Advisers can generate a report showing a list of clients who have provided client consent, including the date of consent, the fee lapsing date and highlighting those clients whose consent is still outstanding.
An online Advice Fee Amendment and Consent Form will be available which will be populated with all the required information to satisfy the new regulatory requirements. Additional functionality to ensure you easily meet your obligations includes reporting on the fee consent status of your clients, the introduction of adviser notifications for when digital client consent has been received, and anniversary reminders to alert you that a client consent is due to expire.
Praemium forms — online and Docusign-ed
Together with the digital consent functionality outlined above, which advisers can use for their own advice documentation, Praemium are bringing more and more commonly used forms online for digital acceptance. Managed account applications and family fee aggregation forms are already fully digital which means obtaining a wet signature for these forms is a thing of the past. And we expect the list to continue to grow.
To assist in obtaining signatures for most other forms, Praemium will now accept Docusign authorisation for most of the forms we require to help manage a client’s day-to-day account requirements. To find out more about using this functionality talk to your Praemium BDM.
Ready for more information?
Praemium’s latest document consent functionality delivers a seamless and paperless compliance workflow, reducing the administrative burden of obtaining client consent, and helping to support advisers with a complete end-to-end digital process. And now with Docusign and an ever-increasing number of forms available for online acceptance through Investor Portal, we can help financial services professionals prepare for the changes that legislation is bringing.
For a list of the forms now available to be authorised via Docusign, please consult the Praemium Help Centre.
More information on this can be found here. We recommend you reach out to your Business Development Team or contact [email protected] to request a demo at your earliest convenience.