Geoff Davey, co-founder of Sydney, Australia-based FinaMetrica, has been traveling the globe for the past month, visiting South Africa, Zimbabwe—notably the beautiful Victoria Falls—Germany, the U.S. and, after the Financial Planning Association's (FPA's) conference in Denver, will trek back home to Sydney.
He's been talking to financial firms and advisors about how to assess their clients' risk tolerances. Davey's company, FinaMetrica, helps advisors understand their clients' risk tolerances, using a "psychometric" risk assessment that was developed with a team of academics in Australia. Advisors can then match that assessment to a risk-appropriate portfolio. See "FinaMetrica's Davey Talks of Risk Profiling for Clients."
This has given Davey and partner, Paul Resnik, who have been traveling to different countries, insights about how these countries are implementing new regulations on advisor conduct toward clients. In the U.S. of course, there is wide coverage of implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act financial reforms. Under Dodd-Frank, the SEC is currently studying "gaps" in the regulation of brokers and investment advisors, and whether to extend the fiduciary standard of conduct—to always put client's interests first, before the advisor's or firm's—to brokers who provide advice to individual investors.
Britain Leads the Way
