Australian Money Market

John Burke, Luke Whiteley & Rosie Harriss –
Professional Investment Services, Bellerive, Tasmania:

I am writing to share our experience of the Australian Money Market (AMM) term deposit platform. On the whole, we have been particularly impressed with the product, the services provided and the overall 'hassle-free' experience. In uncertain financial times, the demand for capital security and term deposits has been strong from many of our clients. The ability to choose from many different banking institutions ensures that rates are competitive in the market place. Aside from this, the processes employed by AMM (email maturity reminders for example) are particularly impressive and efficient.

Thanks particularly should go to Jasmine Inglis, who has been exceptionally helpful & approachable in our dealings with AMM. It is unfortunate that there aren't more people like Jasmine working in the financial services industry; we'd love to have someone like her in every company that we deal with. Overall, AMM provides us and our clients with a comprehensive and efficient platform to facilitate their cash investments. We would have no hesitation in recommending AMM to any financial adviser.

Laura Menschik, Managing Director, WLM Financial Services, Sydney:

We have found Australian Money Money a most useful and innovative addition to the services we are able to offer our clients. Besides being able to help manage our clients' term deposits in an efficient and timely manner, we are able to increase our contact points with clients in a helpful and easy way which has led to very positive feedback.

Bruce Baker, Director, Puzzle Financial, Queensland:

The value I see, as a financial planner, in utilising www.moneymarket.com.au for our clients is as follows. www.moneymarket.com.au provides:

The right product for our clients in these high-risk times term deposits. In these times of very high risk, we believe that short-dated term deposits with high quality Australian banks should be a major component of our clients defensive portfolios.
Good rates & diversification, www.moneymarket.com.au provides us with access to a spread of most of the major banks in Australia – plus many other deposit taking institutions. We like to diversify our clients by spreading the term deposits between a number of institutions. In these times, we think this is important.
The shopping list of term deposit providers continues to grow, help ensuring that we always have access to competitive rates. This is also important to us.
Low fees from www.moneymarket.com.au helps ensure our clients have access to competitive rates in an efficient manner, Australian Money Market only takes a 0.1%pa fee off the gross wholesale interest rates available for the banks.
Ability to rebate all brokerage to our clients. This increases the interest rates that our clients receive. This is for both cash and term deposits. This also supports our ability to remove all conflicts of interest, while providing the best advice to our clients. This should be important for all fee-based financial planners.
Convenient, efficient access to term deposits for our clients. This supports our ability to keep the costs to our clients down. Convenient because we can “buy” a term deposit for a client as easily and as efficiently as buying a share via an online stock broker. To do the same for our clients if we dealt directly with the banks, would require visiting banks, setting up a new account and going through anti-money laundering compliance each time – which is labour intensive. By keeping our costs down, we do not have to pass on higher costs to our clients. We can readily & efficiently switch term deposits from one institution to another, if the rates at one institution are not competitive. It is efficient from a compliance point of view and simple – again helping us to keep the costs to our clients down – and helping us to get a better after-fee result for our clients.
For our record keeping. The electronic data-feed to our Xplan financial planning software enables us to more efficiently maintain our client balance share and transaction records – again, helping us to keep our costs to our clients down.
Good service, friendly, efficient, helpful personal service. This does make a difference. Is this the sort of service you get from a bank?
Advisor friendly. Resolves issues and queries quickly. Convenient, easy-to-use web site
In summary, www.moneymarket.com.au provides us with a unique service to enable us to provide a better and more cost-effective service for our clients – and enabling us to build better client investment portfolios suitable for these risky times. At the same time, www.moneymarket.com.au helps us to keep our costs down and our client net investment returns higher.

Brian Nash, Director, Merlea Investments Pty Ltd, Adelaide:

Australian Money Market has many of the best term deposit rates in the market all in the one place which suits us well. As we are not restricted with mandatory term deposit providers we can select the best rates for our clients without spending time searching all the different providers. AMM also have all the disclosure documents that we require to send to clients to ensure that once recommended we can easily locate and send out. Since beginning using the website, we have seen quite a few changes, some which we, ourselves, had suggested or requested and shows how approachable the AMM team are to outside ideas. The new reporting function will come in very handy for our SMSF clients for their compliance requirements.

Paul Giordano, Financial Planner, Perspective Group, Sydney:

"We have been a user of Australian Money Market for over two years and it now forms an integral part of our operations. AMM gives us a wide range of short, medium and long dated term deposits all available via a single portal, i.e. a kind of wrap account for term deposits. This enables us to proactively manage client’s cash positions in an efficient manner, resulting in a greater overall return on cash holdings. This has been particularly important during recent times as our clients have held larger cash positions than usual and AMM has allowed us to access higher rates of return with minimal cost to the clients or the business. I estimate that we have been able to add approximately 2% p.a. to client cash returns since using this service."

Ron Ogilvie, Director, O & M Financial Services, NSW:

I have used it for a number of clients and they really like its ease of operation, diversity of financial institutions and the good rates on offer. They really like how easy it is to switch when deposits mature. As an adviser it allows me to offer my client a wide choice of good rates plus it's very easy to use. Importantly I appreciate the excellent personalised service (they actually phone me if needed) I receive from the AMM staff.