Optimo Financial is owned privately by parties who are active in the business; Hugh Bannister, Nicole Bannister and Ken Stocks. Intelligent Energy Systems, a software and advisory company operating in the energy and finance sectors, also has a shareholding because its expertise is used to develop our Pathfinder strategy development model, with advice from financial planners. Optimo Financial has no affiliations with any other financial institutions. 

Optimo Financial Pty Ltd is the holder of Australian Financial Services Number (AFSL) 332674. You can check our validity (or any financial planning company’s validity) in the ASIC licensee register at http://www.search.asic.gov.au/fsr/flb.html 

Our financial planners are members of the Financial Planning Association of Australia (FPA).

Optimo Financial's principals, Hugh Bannister and Ken Stocks, began business life as mathematical modellers with the company IES back in the 1980s. For over 25 years they have been building energy and financial models using the mathematical technique of optimisation. One product, Apollo, is still used by major banks and is used to structure the financing of large assets such as jumbo jets and harbour tunnels.

As they started to look to their own financial affairs, they became unhappy with the quality of advice and charges levied by their own advisers. They found all the rules and choices on super, tax and the pension so complex and labyrinthine that a good strategy was beyond the power of a simple spreadsheet or the simple calculators on many websites. In short, they thought that it looked like a mathematical problem waiting to be solved. And so, with financial planners experienced in the traditional industry, they developed the Pathfinder® personal finance optimisation software. Their strong grounding in operations research, mathematical optimisation and long-term financial modelling brought a unique and innovative perspective to addressing the challenges of the financial planning sector. The strategies that Pathfinder® can produce have been found to be superior to those produced by other methods.

 

But not only did they want to produce high quality, optimised financial strategies, they wanted to provide the type of financial planning services that they wished they could have received all those years ago – fee for service with no hidden fees and without commissions being paid out of their accounts to financial planners who offered no further advice. So they were pleased to have Jade Stack join the company as Responsible Manager dedicated to providing high quality plans with a fair and clear fee structure.