Financial planning training company RG146 collapses

Financial planning training company RG146 Training Australia has entered administration after struggling through the financial crisis.

Gideon Rathner and David Coyne of Lowe Lippmann were appointed as administrators in August but last week RG146 entered into a scheme of arrangement.

The company provides financial services education courses and is a partner of the Association of Financial Advisers.

Dr Mark Sinclair, chief executive of RG146, told SmartCompany the training provider had turned a corner since the administration.

Losses of $657,000 in 2009 and increased competition in 2010-11 contributed to the problems with the business.

“We were carrying debt from 2008 and the global financial crisis and we needed to pay it down so it was necessary to do a restructure,” says Sinclair.

“We called in Lowe Lippmann to help us renegotiate debt and we entered into an agreement with our creditors and paid them in full as well as undertaking redundancies.”

Sinclair says RG146 is now back on track.

“We made a healthy profit this year and we have improved our position by $400,000,” he says. 

The collapse demonstrates that it is not just financial advisers who are dealing with uncertainty stemming from the wide-ranging Future of Financial Advice reforms.

The reforms have been criticised by independent financial advisors who say that Federal Government reforms of the sector will disproportionately hurt small and medium-sized enterprises in the sector.

The criticism follows the collapse of Storm Financial and Trio Capital.

SmartCompany contacted Lowe Lippmann and the Association of Financial Advisers but they failed to reply before publication.