The Fee That Keeps Itself Switched On

# The Fee That Keeps Itself Switched On

If you pay a financial adviser an ongoing fee, it comes out quietly. A deduction from your account, usually monthly, usually the same amount, usually without anything arriving to mark the occasion.

Something changed in how that arrangement is authorised, and it changed in a way most people affected have not noticed. It is worth ten minutes, whether you are perfectly happy with your adviser or have been meaning to think about the arrangement for three years.

This is general information, not personal financial advice, and it takes no position on whether ongoing advice is worth paying for — that depends entirely on your circumstances. It is about how the arrangement is authorised and where your say in it sits.

Ongoing fees run on consent, not on inertia

Start with the part that has not changed and is worth knowing.

An ongoing fee cannot simply continue because it always has. Written consent is required — both to enter into or renew an ongoing fee arrangement, and to deduct the ongoing fees from your account.

So there is a moment, by design, when the arrangement has to be put back in front of you and you have to agree to it continuing. That moment is a protection, and it exists because ongoing fees charged to people who had stopped receiving any service were one of the findings that came out of the Banking Royal Commission.

What the reforms changed

The Delivering Better Financial Outcomes reforms — usually shortened to DBFO — consolidated and streamlined those consents into a single-form approach.

The start day was 10 January 2025. It applies to arrangements entered into on or after that date, and to arrangements already in force from the first anniversary of the arrangement occurring after the start day.

That second limb explains something a lot of long-standing clients noticed and could not account for: if your arrangement has been running for years, the new paperwork would have reached you at your next anniversary after January 2025, not immediately. If the forms looked different at some point in the last eighteen months and nobody explained why, that is why.

ASIC's guidance on how it all works is Information Sheet 286, published on 4 October 2024.

The change nobody mentioned: the annual statement stopped being required

Here is the part worth stopping on.

The DBFO Act removed the obligation to give clients a fee disclosure statement annually.

For years, the FDS was the document that landed once a year and set out what you had paid over the previous twelve months and what services you were entitled to receive. Whatever else it did, it forced a think. It arrived, you looked at the number, and once a year you had an involuntary moment of considering whether the arrangement still made sense.

That document is no longer required to come.

This was a legislative simplification, not something advisers did — and it sits alongside a consent regime that was tightened rather than loosened. But the practical effect for you is real: the annual prompt that used to arrive on its own no longer does.

And consent can be a tick in a box

The other half of the picture is that consent can be given electronically.

ASIC's guidance is explicit that a client can consent by, for example, ticking a checkbox on a webpage in response to wording such as "By ticking the box, you consent to renewing the ongoing fee arrangement and to the charging of the ongoing fees that are set out in this document" — or by emailing a consent with an electronic signature attached.

That is genuinely good. It removes printing, posting and chasing from a process that used to generate all three, and it is far more likely to actually get done.

It is also, and there is no way around this, very easy to click through without reading. A checkbox takes a second. A statement of what you have paid and what you are getting takes rather longer, and nothing now compels you to spend that time.

Both of those things are true at once. The convenience is real and so is the risk, and the risk is not the form — it is treating the form as paperwork.

So the consent request is now your annual review

This is the practical conclusion, and it is the only recommendation this article makes.

The fee disclosure statement used to do a job nobody assigned it: it triggered an annual review by arriving. It does not arrive any more. The consent request is now the one scheduled moment each year when the arrangement is put back in front of you.

So when it turns up, before you find the checkbox, ask three questions.

What am I paying? Not the percentage, the dollars. Over a year. If you cannot answer that from memory, that alone is worth the ten minutes.

What am I getting for it? Ongoing advice covers very different things in different arrangements — annual reviews, portfolio monitoring, Centrelink reporting, strategy work, availability when something happens. What is your arrangement meant to include, and have you had it?

Is that still what I need? This is the one that matters most in retirement and the one nothing in the system will ever prompt. What you needed advice on at 62 — accumulation, structuring, the transition itself — is not what you need at 82, when the questions are more likely to be aged care, estate structure, and someone reliable to ring. Sometimes the answer is that you need more, not less. The point is that it is a live question and it has probably not been asked for a while.

Our annual retirement plan review checklist is a reasonable place to anchor those questions so they get asked whether or not a form arrives.

Where this gets fragile

A once-a-year, one-click consent is a light-touch safeguard, and it is lightest exactly where it needs to be strongest.

If someone's capacity is declining, an electronic consent renewed each year without a document arriving is very close to no review at all. The fee continues, the questions never get asked, and there is no annual statement landing in the letterbox for a family member to notice. Our article on protecting against cognitive decline covers the broader problem, and this is one specific place it bites.

If you are helping an older relative with their finances, the ongoing fee arrangement is worth putting on the list of things to look at — not because anything is wrong, but because it is one of the few recurring costs that now renews with less visible paperwork than it used to.

If something looks wrong

Ask your adviser first, and ask specifically. What am I paying, what does the arrangement cover, and when was my last review? A good adviser will answer that in a sentence and probably have the documents to hand — this is ordinary client service, not a confrontation.

If you were charged an ongoing fee for a period when you had no arrangement, or you did not consent, raise it. Start with the licensee's internal complaints process.

If that does not resolve it, the Australian Financial Complaints Authority handles advice fee disputes, and it is free to consumers. Our article on financial disputes and AFCA covers how it works.

And if you are reconsidering the relationship rather than the fee, our articles on choosing a financial adviser and on what actually happens when you see one cover that ground, as does our article on what to do when your adviser retires.

The one-line version

Ongoing advice fees run on consent that has to be renewed — but the annual fee disclosure statement that used to arrive and prompt a review is no longer required, and the consent itself can be a tick in a box. So the consent request is now the annual review, and it is worth treating it as one.

Sources

• ASIC — FAQs: Ongoing fee arrangements and consents (INFO 286)
• ASIC — Delivering Better Financial Outcomes (DBFO) package
• ASIC — FAQs: Ongoing fee arrangements
• ASIC — Fees (giving financial product advice)

This article contains general information only. It does not constitute personal financial advice and does not take into account your individual financial situation, objectives, or needs. It expresses no view on whether ongoing financial advice is appropriate or good value for any individual — that depends entirely on your circumstances and on what your arrangement provides. The consent and disclosure obligations described are those of financial services licensees and their representatives under the law as at the date below; the arrangements applying to your own adviser should be confirmed with them. Information is current as at 10 August 2026.

Theodore Karoumbalis is an Authorised Representative (No. 1237098) of iAdvice Technology Pty Ltd, AFSL 526700.