Though the regulator may be open to some winding back of red tape measures, one item which will almost certainly be off the table is the legal obligation for financial advisers to act in the best interests of clients and that is where Burridge believes Lumiant has an edge.
“The platform assists in creating a common language between the adviser and the client that helps instruct the true best interests that need to be met,” the former financial adviser says.
Unlike so many fintechs aimed at advisers, Lumiant focuses not on the end outcomes of a financial plan like recommendation of a certain fund or reporting of investment returns but on the initial fact find and client onboarding process, which for much of the industry is just an opportunity to tick compliance boxes or assess investment risk appetite.
Bucking the trend of pure digital applications, Burridge worked with psychologists and “human-centred design” experts to come up with a physical set of 16 “values statements” printed on coloured cardboard and resembling a pack of playing cards.
They contain phrases like “nurture my relationships”, “become more active and healthy”, “live a more purposeful life” not “outperform the S&P/ASX 200”, “construct a well-diversified portfolio of bonds” or any other performance metric you might associate with an old school financial planning process.
With the assistance of their adviser, the client then ranks them, setting out clear life goals that form the basis of a plan. “It enables clients to identify how they can align their values to their money,” Burridge says.
This is not just some new age fad or kneejerk reaction to the culture of greed exposed by Hayne, but an emerging and potentially lucrative global business model.
The idea that the purpose of financial advice should be to maximise happiness, not investment returns, is a minority but growing philosophy among the industry’s members.
Joe Duran, a smooth-talking, Rhodesian-born wealth manager and regular on US business news channels, is its most famous proponent.
US wealth manager Joe Duran sold United Capital to Goldman Sachs in 2019.  Tim Hale
“Life isn’t about saving as much as possible to die rich. Sometimes it’s better to spend it now so you live rich,” Duran told AFR Weekend in January 2018.
It’s a mantra that earned him enemies on Wall Street, given its self-interest in charging percentage-based fees on chunky retirement balances.
But it was one that eventually led to a $US750 million ($1.02 billion) windfall in 2019, when he sold his firm, United Capital, to Goldman Sachs, arguably the world’s most prestigious investment bank.
It was a serendipitous ending for a man who migrated to the US with just $600 to his name and a sign that the big end of town had caught up with his very Millennial take on wealth management.
Within the business now known as Goldman Sachs Personal Financial Management sits Duran’s flagship HonestConversations, a behavioural psychology exercise for clients featuring a deck of cards.
Burridge freely admits Lumiant took initial inspiration from HonestConversations a product he saw Duran himself demo during study tours to New York over the past decade though he has built it from scratch for the Australian industry and its much stricter regulations.
Indeed, Burridge once harboured hopes of some kind of tie-up with United Capital, but was pipped at the post by pre-Hayne AMP, which inked a deal with Duran in 2017, parading the US money guru with fanfare before its long-suffering institutional shareholders.
That partnership, which AMP used to inform its “Goals 360”, officially fell apart due to the Goldman Sachs acquisition.
But the progressive Duran was also appalled by the findings of criminal misconduct levelled against his antipodean partner by the royal commission.
That inquiry triggered AMP’s tumultuous decline to its current state of flux, as it awaits the results of a review which could see the 171-year-old wealth manager broken up.
Meanwhile, with Duran re-born as a Goldman Sachs executive and the Australian institutions either exiting the wealth business or wallowing in self-inflicted turmoil, Burridge kept on tinkering with Lumiant.
With each news cycle he became more confident that the worst elements of the industry were slipping away and advisers, consumers and regulators were waking up to what he calls the “patchwork of ill-conceived, product-based technologies and legacy business models”.
In other words, a deck of cards desperately in need of shuffling.