A Financial Services Guide (FSG) informs you of your rights, entitlements and details the services we provide. It is simply part of the regulatory process to help ensure that clients are fully aware of their undertakings with financial advice providers.
At the start of the relationship between a Financial Adviser and a client, there is an obligation to fully inform you of your rights, entitlements and detail the services we provide. A Financial Services Guide (FSG) is provided by our licensee, Synchron,andprovides an outline about who your adviser is and the types of services they are licensed to provide.
The FSG also provides information regarding all of the advisers that make up our team. This means you can familiarise yourself with the other advisers which come together to form the Financial Framework Team.
The FSG is also intended to inform you of certain basic matters relating to your relationship with your adviser and Synchron prior to you being provided with any specific advice. Subjects referred to in the FSG disclose who Synchron is, contact details for Synchron and how Synchron and Financial Framework are remunerated. It also includes information on what to do in the event of a complaint and the method by which we engage our professional advice process.
It is intended that this document should assist you in determining whether to use any of the services described.
If you are an existing client you would have already received a version of our FSG (or maybe more than one version!). This is because each time a change is made to our FSG we receive a new version from Synchron and are obliged to provide it to all clients so you are aware of the changes. Usually our updates are about new advisers who join our team or changes to the services they can offer.
REGULATION OF THE FINANCIAL SERVICES GUIDE
Under Pt 7.7 of the Corporations Act, providing entities that provide financial product advice to retail clients must prepare and provide a Financial Services Guide (FSG), give a general advice warning when giving general advice, and prepare and provide a Statement of Advice (SOA) when giving personal advice.
Under Div 2 of Pt 7.7A, advice providers providing personal advice to retail clients must comply with the ‘best interests duty’ and related obligations, which have been introduced as part of the Government’s Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) reform package to improve the quality of financial advice received by retail clients.
