MED Consultation Proves Useful
13 September 2010
The workshops arranged by INFINZ where members of the industry can join with their peers and officials from the Ministry of Economic Development to ‘stress test’ the wording of the wholesale carve-out within the Financial Advisers Act 2008 have proven to be very useful to all concerned. Delegates have learned how the carve-out applies to them, whether they need to be an AFA and under what circumstances would class advice slip into personal advice. The free workshops put on by INFINZ are a great initiative and indicate a commitment to both the industry and our regulators to ensure our legislation is fit for purpose.
MED officials have heard of some of the pitfalls in the legislation for market practitioners event to the extent of how difficult it is for a practitioner on the fringes of the AFA regime to obtain an AFA qualification if they aren’t already so engaged and therefore can’t show practical application of their work.
INFINZ will no doubt work with affected parties to obtain an exemption if possible in this regard or get an educational recognition of other work that could be used for the practical application as required to become an AFA.
Minter Ellison Rudd Watts put together a very comprehensive overview of the FAA and the AFA regime for use at the workshops and used this to both reacquaint participants with the legislation and to point out some of the fishhooks for the unwary.
Workshops have been held in Auckland and Wellington and were to be held in Christchurch on the Tuesday following the earthquake but for obvious reasons this has been canceled.
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