Judging awards is one of the genuine privileges of this job, and I say that as someone whose working life is mostly legislation and exposure drafts. For a few weeks a year, someone hands me a pile of submissions from advisers putting forward their very best work — their strongest argument for why they should be crowned Best Adviser In The Known Galaxy — and asks me to pick between them. It is unfortunately sometimes the closest I get to the actual practice of advice these days, and it brings me great joy.
And then I get to the Statements of Advice.
The Good
The advice is superb, and I am not being polite. The submissions contain thinking I would be proud to have produced, and I am proud to see our profession producing. Advisers who found the actual problem and used their skill to solve. Clients who came in frightened and left with a plan they understood.
You could see the craft. The profession is doing far better work than the commentary about it would, at times, suggest.
The Bad
Then you get to the SOA document itself.
So I did something slightly obsessive. I took the sixteen Statements of Advice that came across my desk in one judging round — not cherry-picked, just taken as they came — and laid every page of all of them out at the same scale, in original order and colour, nothing altered. Sixteen documents. Eight hundred and eighty-four pages. 8–8–4!!!
Figure 1: Sixteen Statements of Advice, every page. Page content is lightly blurred to protect the confidentiality of the practices involved. Page order, colour, scale and relative document length are unchanged.
You do not need me to describe what you are looking at. Sixteen practices, sixteen clients, sixteen wildly different levels of complexity — and you cannot tell one document from another. Nothing on any page says this bit is the important bit. These documents were never designed. They were assembled.
Then look at the lengths. The shortest is nineteen pages. The longest is one hundred and thirty. Same law. Same regulatory guidance. Same obligations. Same profession. Same “best piece of advice I’ve provided in the last year”. A six-and-a-half-fold difference.
Which settles an argument we have been having with ourselves for as long as I have been in this profession. If the law required a hundred and thirty pages, nobody could have done it in nineteen. Whatever drives these documents, it is not the Corporations Act.
Set that against the FAAA’s MyMavins research — a separate study of advised clients rather than these sixteen files — which puts SOA production at twenty to twenty-six hours a document, and finds roughly one in seven advised clients reads the finished thing in full. Different samples, but the shape is hard to miss: three working days, spent on something six clients in seven will not finish. (Maybe I should have taken a leaf out of their book?)
And here is the part that got to me. Several of those advisers had also built a presentation to walk the client through the advice — considered, well designed, built so a human being could follow it. Then they handed the client the wall of text to keep.
Which one does the client still have in twelve months?
Figure 2: the same sixteen documents as vertical lanes, all blurring into each other.
The SOA is the artefact that survives the meeting. It is what a client goes back to when they cannot remember why they did the thing they did — and, initially at least, what they think they paid for.
And we give them legal drivel.
The Ugly
The ugly part is not the documents. It is that we have known better for a decade and nothing has moved.
In 2016 I told the Communication Research Institute, then commissioned by ASIC to design a better sample SOA, that the exercise was doomed because they were still designing a piece of paper — their own research had found only about a quarter of consumers could use an existing SOA satisfactorily, and nobody closes that gap with better paragraphs.
In 2019 we ran the Future of the SOA project, on three mindset shifts I still think are the whole ballgame. It is a statement, not a document. It is about understanding, not disclosure. And it has to be interesting, because a bored client is an unadvised client.
In 2020 we asked the Assistant Minister and ASIC for a video SOA pilot. In 2021 and 2022 we built it — sample SOAs recorded, reviewed by ASIC with positive feedback, consumer-tested, packaged as a toolkit any practice could pick up on Monday. Independent research tested and showed clients understood the video better and were more likely to watch it than read the document. And the finding I still think about: a written SOA costs more to produce than clients will pay for a copy of it.
And the regulatory position has been in plain sight the whole time. RG 90.14 says an SOA is a communication that lets a client make an informed decision. RG 175.175 requires it to be clear, concise and effective. Sections 947B and 947C list what has to be in it — a shorter list than you remember.
None of that says paper, and none of it says eighty pages. The law prescribes content. It has never prescribed format.
Whose fault is it, then?
Not the advisers who entered. These are among the best practitioners in the country, submitting work they are proudest of. If they are shipping the wall of text, the problem is not skill or effort — almost nobody in the chain between an adviser and a client has an incentive to make that document better.
AFCA put it plainly to the Quality of Advice Review: SOAs are “primarily drafted with an eye to legal requirements and the needs of the advisory firm’s compliance department, rather than a consumer-centric document.” Michelle Levy’s final report said the current law already permits clear, concise advice documents. The blockage was never the statute. We have collapsed two jobs into one artefact — what the client needs to understand and what the adviser needs to be able to prove — and optimised entirely for the second.
Those two jobs have always been separable. Keep the evidence in the file, where it can be as long and as defensive as your licensee’s lawyer wants. Give the client what they will actually use: a short statement of what we are doing and why, and a recording of the meeting where you explained it. The detailed record still exists — it just stops being the client’s souvenir.
Anyway
With the judging done, I am back to the day job — this week, some new part of the Delivering Better Financial Outcomes exposure draft, where our great hope is that the Statement of Advice will be replaced by something called a Client Advice Record, delivered by a new class of adviser we spent a memorable few months in 2024 calling a “Qualified Adviser” – but is more likely about another cost on the profession.
And I will sit there and think happy thoughts. Because renaming the document will fix it. It absolutely will. Any minute now.
In the meantime: the next SOA that leaves your office will be read by a client who paid you a great deal of money and is, on the MyMavins numbers, six times more likely to not finish it than to finish it. You do not need an Act of Parliament to change that. You need to decide the document is for them.
General information for advisers, not personal financial advice. Ben Marshan is the founder of Marshan Consulting and led the FPA’s Future of the SOA and Video SOA projects, 2019–2022. No award submission, entrant or program is identified here — the advice was excellent, which is rather the point.
