Inside Money: Delisting mystery - FMA sends AFAs offsite

David Chaplin says Authorised Financial Advisers have mysteriously disappeared from the FMA website. Image: Thinkstock.

Aside from more work for lawyers, financial services regulation has introduced a much higher level of transparency to an industry that once hid in the shadows.

For the first time, consumers can view almost-exhaustive lists of who does what in the multi-layered extravaganza that is the financial services industry.

And you can find most of this information on the just-revamped Financial Markets Authority (FMA) website that as per its tagline, is aimed at "promoting fair, efficient and transparent financial markets".

Everybody is here: KiwiSaver schemes, crowd funders, peer-to-peers; fund managers (only three so far, but they will all be there by December next year), and so on.

Everybody is there, except one important sub-group list has mysteriously disappeared from the FMA website: Authorised Financial Advisers (AFAs).

As advisers were the first financial services group to enter the FMA-regulated world, the AFA list has been around since 2012ish on the regulator's website, providing a useful point of reference for consumers and other interested parties.

While it was fairly rudimentary - in the military tradition of name, rank, serial number - the AFA list offered a complete picture of who advisers were and where they worked.

For those who wanted to delve deeper into the industry structure, the AFA list was a good place to start.

Even the running tally of AFAs (1842 last time I looked) was an excellent example of transparency in action.

Now, instead of this simple, open way of listing AFAs, the new FMA website refers consumers to the Financial Services Providers Register.

"If you don't have an AFA and want to find the names of AFAs in your area, you can search for on the FSPR website," the FMA advises, which is true - although it's not exactly an intuitive journey (special directions have been provided by the regulator).

A spokesperson for the FMA said: "This change was made to ensure users are connected with the most up to date information about AFAs as possible as the FSPR is updated in real time when AFAs register, deregister or change their details".

"Previously, the list on the FMA site was updated manually as information was received."

But in exchange for saving someone the onerous job of uploading an excel spreadsheet once a month, the FMA has also taken a step back into the dark ages.