Six years of independent review data show materially fewer poor outcomes and Sound advice becoming the norm, but little movement in Good or Exceptional ratings.
Public debate about the quality of financial advice is usually driven by failure. Enforcement action, compensation claims, remediation programs and court decisions show where advice has gone wrong. They matter, but they don’t show whether the quality of everyday advice is improving.
The inaugural Advice Quality Index establishes an independent longitudinal benchmark for answering that question. It analyses 9,315 independently reviewed advice files from 1 July 2020 to 30 June 2026 using Assured Support’s consistent Advice Assurance Review methodology. The Index is informed by a broader dataset of more than 24,614 files reviewed across more than 200 Australian licensees since 2015.
The central finding is clear: within the reviewed population, the floor has risen.
The proportion of files assessed as Poor or Very Poor fell from 20.9 per cent in 2020–21 to 10.0 per cent in 2025–26. Poor advice declined from 18.5 per cent to 9.7 per cent. Very Poor advice declined from 2.4 per cent to 0.3 per cent. Over the same period, Sound advice increased from 77.0 per cent to 88.2 per cent.
Within the reviewed population, that’s a substantial change in the distribution of advice quality. Advice assessed below the expected standard became less than half as common, while advice reliably meeting the expected legal, professional and evidentiary standard became the dominant outcome.
Advice Quality Index 2026: key findings
Across 9,315 independently reviewed advice files from 1 July 2020 to 30 June 2026:
- Poor and Very Poor advice fell from 20.9% to 10.0%.
- Poor advice fell from 18.5% to 9.7%.
- Very Poor advice fell from 2.4% to 0.3%.
- Sound advice increased from 77.0% to 88.2%.
- Good advice remained between 1.8% and 2.6%.
- Exceptional advice never exceeded 0.2% in any year.
The results show a substantial improvement in reliability within the reviewed population: below-standard advice became materially less common and Sound advice became the dominant outcome.
They do not establish the prevalence or quality of advice across the entire Australian financial advice profession. The reviewed files were not drawn from a random industry-wide sample.
The next quality challenge is therefore different from the first. Having reduced the incidence of below-standard advice within the reviewed population, the opportunity is to understand what consistently moves advice from Sound to Good or Exceptional.
Raising the floor isn’t raising the ceiling
The data doesn’t show a corresponding surge in Good or Exceptional advice. Good advice remained a small and variable proportion of the reviewed population, ranging from 1.8 to 2.6 per cent. Exceptional advice never exceeded 0.2 per cent in any year.
Reducing below-standard advice and increasing advice that demonstrably exceeds the expected standard are different stages of quality development.
The first stage is reliability: reducing the cumulative weaknesses in advice, process and evidence that cause otherwise viable files to fall below the expected standard. It requires advisers and licensees to reduce the cumulative weaknesses that cause otherwise viable advice to fall below the expected standard. The second stage is excellence. It requires stronger professional judgement, clearer reasoning, better evidence, more effective communication and a consistently client-centred process.
The results show substantial progress in the first stage. They don’t suggest the work is finished. Having raised the floor within the reviewed population, the next challenge is to raise the ceiling.
Why Sound advice matters
Sound advice can be underrated because the label makes it sound ordinary. It shouldn’t be. A Sound rating means that the advice, considered as a whole, meets the expected legal, professional, and evidentiary standards in a complex and highly regulated environment.
The assessment is broader than technical compliance. It considers professional judgement, evidentiary support, client outcomes and the effectiveness of the advice process.
The methodology also distinguishes between the overall rating and individual exceptions. A Sound or Good file may contain both positive and negative exceptions. The presence of an exception doesn’t, by itself, mean the advice was poor. Its direction, significance and context must be considered alongside the overall quality of the file.
This is why counting findings is a weak measure of review performance. Boards, Responsible Managers and compliance teams should instead examine whether findings are significant, recurring or systemic, whether corrective action changes future behaviour, and whether the overall distribution of advice quality improves over time.
Improvement without overclaiming causation
The six-year period coincided with educational reforms, Design and Distribution Obligations, expanded breach reporting, evolving best-interests guidance, and increasing evidentiary expectations. The operating environment did not become simpler.
The Index doesn’t establish which reforms, supervisory practices or market factors caused the improvement. The movement may reflect changes in adviser capability, documentation, supervision, governance, technology, professional standards or some combination of those factors.
What the data does establish is that improvement occurred despite that demanding environment. That is a meaningful professional and governance achievement.
For a licensee, the practical question isn’t simply whether its review pass rate is improving. It’s whether poor outcomes are becoming less frequent, whether recurring weaknesses are actually being removed, and whether the business can identify and reproduce the practices associated with stronger advice.
What licensees should take from the results
Licensees should track the full distribution of ratings rather than rely on an average score. An average can conceal whether improvement reflects fewer poor files, more good files or both.
They should treat the reduction of Poor and Very Poor advice as a distinct governance objective, while recognising that developing Good and Exceptional advice is a separate capability challenge. Negative exceptions can identify weaknesses requiring intervention. Positive exceptions can identify practices worth reinforcing across the business.
The Index isn’t based on a random sample of all Australian advice files. The reviewed population comprises licensees and advice businesses that elected to commission independent reviews and may differ from the broader profession in governance maturity, quality-assurance priorities, or willingness to submit their advice to external scrutiny.
Even with that limitation, the dataset spans more than 200 Australian licensees with varied ownership structures, business models and supervisory arrangements. It provides a substantial longitudinal view of how advice quality changed within a large and consistently assessed population.
The most defensible conclusion is also the most useful one. Independently reviewed advice became materially more reliable over six years. Within the reviewed population, the floor has risen. The next challenge is to build on that foundation and raise the ceiling.
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The Advice Quality Index 2026 draws on Assured Support’s broader dataset of more than 24,614 advice files reviewed across more than 200 Australian licensees.
Advice Quality Index 2026 in the media
- Are higher standards being demonstrated in advice files? — Money Management
- Advice improving by becoming less bad — Financial Newswire
- Advice Quality Index: six years of advice review data – AdviserVoice
- Advice quality improving, but ‘exceptional’ advice remains elusive – Professional Planner
- Advice quality raises the floor, but not quite the ceiling – ifa
Further reading
Frequently Asked Questions
No. It shows a substantial improvement within the population independently reviewed by Assured Support, but it does not establish the same trend across every Australian adviser or licensee.
Across the 9,315 files included in the six-year Index, Poor and Very Poor ratings declined from 20.9% in 2020–21 to 10.0% in 2025–26, while Sound ratings increased from 77.0% to 88.2%. Those movements provide strong longitudinal evidence about the reviewed population.
The qualification matters because the files were not drawn from a random sample of the entire advice profession. Participating businesses elected to commission independent reviews and may differ from the broader market.
For boards and Responsible Managers, the useful benchmark is therefore directional rather than universal: compare the distribution and trajectory of your own independently assessed advice against a consistent methodology rather than assuming an industry-wide “10% poor advice” benchmark.
No. A Sound rating is an overall assessment under Assured Support’s review methodology; it should not be represented as a statutory safe harbour or proof that every individual legal requirement has been satisfied.
The article expressly notes that a Sound or Good file can contain positive and negative exceptions. The significance, direction and context of those findings must be considered alongside the overall file assessment.
That distinction is important because personal advice to retail clients remains subject to specific statutory obligations, including the best interests duty under s 961B, appropriate advice under s 961G and, where relevant, the client-priority obligation under s 961J. ASIC also emphasises the importance of records demonstrating the information relied upon, actions taken and reasons supporting the advice.
A licensee should therefore retain visibility of both the overall quality rating and material exceptions. Aggregating everything into a single pass/fail result risks obscuring precisely the evidence needed for supervision and remediation.
Because exception volume does not reveal the seriousness, recurrence or systemic significance of those exceptions.
A file with several minor documentary weaknesses may present less risk than a file containing one fundamental failure in client inquiry, strategy reasoning or appropriateness. Conversely, repeated apparently minor exceptions across advisers can indicate a control or process weakness that deserves governance attention. The Index methodology deliberately separates individual exceptions from the overall quality assessment for this reason.
A more useful board-level view combines the distribution of overall ratings with exception severity, recurrence, root cause and remediation outcomes. It should also distinguish negative exceptions requiring intervention from positive exceptions that reveal practices worth reinforcing.
The governance test is therefore not “How many findings did we have?” but “What do those findings tell us about advice quality, where is risk concentrated, and is corrective action changing subsequent behaviour?”
It should investigate whether its quality-assurance system is primarily effective at preventing failure rather than developing higher-quality professional judgement.
That is the central “floor versus ceiling” distinction in the Index. Poor and Very Poor ratings fell sharply and Sound became dominant, but Good remained between 1.8% and 2.6%, while Exceptional never exceeded 0.2%.
The first operational check is what separates stronger files from merely adequate ones. Review positive exceptions, reasoning quality, client questioning, strategy comparisons, evidentiary support and communication—not simply negative findings. ASIC’s guidance itself recognises the importance of professional judgement in determining the subject matter and scope of advice and of maintaining records demonstrating the advice process.
A licensee can then ask whether coaching, peer review and adviser development reproduce those stronger practices. Eliminating defects and developing excellence require different interventions.
Analytics can reveal important patterns, but only if the underlying review methodology preserves context and professional judgement.
The Index illustrates why. Counting findings alone can produce a misleading picture because an exception does not automatically determine the overall quality of a file. A useful system therefore needs to preserve rating distribution, exception direction and significance, recurrence, adviser or cohort patterns, remediation and subsequent review outcomes.
Technology is particularly useful for identifying changes that are difficult to see file by file: whether Poor outcomes are concentrating in particular advice types, whether the same exception keeps recurring after remediation, or whether positive practices correlate with stronger overall assessments.
The practical control is to define the governance question first and configure reporting around it. A dashboard that counts activity is easy to build; a defensible surveillance system needs to show whether identified risks and interventions are actually changing advice outcomes.
