Brett Evans

So with the advent of anti-money laundering, KYC, CRS, and all the acronyms that we love to throw around about compliance, a lot of the discount platforms in Australia have shut the shop to expats because it's more compliance work.

Their margins for profitability are so thin that it's

Me here in Dubai, I know our clients because I sit down and have coffee with them.

A call centre operator for ComSec wouldn't have a clue who I am if I was a client.

So if you ring up and say to them, hey, I'm now living in Qatar, here's my Qatari address, they'll freeze your account straight away.

Then if you don't take action to move that account, they'll cancel the chess in and convert all the holdings to where she was sponsored, which is a big problem.

And the reason it's a big problem because regionally we don't have postman.

So we don't get mail.

So you imagine computer share and link market services sending all those blue statements out with the SRN on it to the client.

It goes nowhere.

And now the registries have done their legal duty because they only have to provide the SRN once.

Anytime you want it after, you have to pay $110 per number.

So we had one client move here, came into here, called up ComSec and said, hey, here I am.

It's about a $1.2 million portfolio on ComSec.

They converted the whole thing to issue a sponsored.

He then had to spend $4,000 Australian dollars

going to all the individual registries to get that number for us to be able to in specie transfer it on.

So it is a nightmare.

So first thing you need to do is in a general sense, work out whether the platform you're using is expat friendly.

I guess you could say not many are, hardly any.