Marketing

Fiona Reddan: Financial advisers slow to display fees and commission rates


I got a fright at the doctor’s last week. Not in the consultation room thankfully, but on my way out when I was charged €70 for the visit. Surely the last time I visited it was only about €55?

It was my own fault. These days it’s easy to check out how much a routine medical or dental procedure is going to cost you.

You can also check out how much the clinic down the road, or in the next county, or even across the Border, is going to cost, and let that inform your decision.

The requirement for both doctors and dentists to display their prices in their surgeries and online has been a remarkable success story for patients. It wasn’t that long ago that being told that you needed a root canal, or a crown, caused you as much fear as to how much it might eventually cost, as the pain involved in the procedure.

Does it exert a bias towards products that pay the highest rates of commission, for example, or just a bias towards a transaction

Money simply wasn’t something to be discussed with the medical professions.

So it’s a shame then that an initiative suggested by the Central Bank of Ireland back in 2017, to bring the same sort of rigour to the disclosure of fees for financial advice, hasn’t yet come to fruition – or progressed a jot.

One welcome development in recent years has been the growth of fee-based financial advice, and many advisers already clearly publish their charges on their websites or in their offices – detailing how much they’ll bill for an hour of advice, or a financial makeover.

For consumers, the issue arises when they offer not just a fee-based service, but one in which fees are also earned via commission payments.

A Central Bank study in 2016 of consumers’ understanding of commission payments showed that there was much confusion as to how – and how frequently – advisers are remunerated by product providers.



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