But you aren’t eliminating the conflict of interest by simply...

But you aren’t eliminating the conflict of interest by simply having the banks dump their wealth management businesses [*].

In order to do that, you would have to completely separate Financial Advice from Platform Administration, Investment Management and Trustee Services.

And (as it has been previously discussed on these threads) by doing that you are forcing an increase in operational costs for the industry, which will eventually be passed on to customers.

Thus, a full breakup of the vertical integration model wouldn’t necessarily end up being in the best interest of consumers; this has been implicitly acknowledged by ASIC too.

[*]: I personally suspect that the dumping of WM by the banks has more to do with the fact that those businesses haven’t performed as well as initially desired, and have now become an ongoing source of regulatory trouble, rather than with an expectation of being forced to do so by future legislation.