About us

Snowgum Financial Services specialises in facilitating the wealth management, private banking and life insurance needs of professionals, business owners, senior executives and their families. Working in partnership with legal and accounting professional’s, we assist in the efficient structuring of inter-generational wealth planning.

Snowgum Financial Services was founded in 2015 and remains privately owned. Advice delivery is agnostic from institutional mandates or external bias. We partner with clients solely for their financial benefit. Advice formation is strategy led, focussing key drivers and tax efficient optimisation of entity use. Advice execution leverages smart technology, incorporating a range of investment opportunity sets.

We employ a robust risk management framework, incorporating tactical asset allocation tilts to express our view on market risks. This aims to deliver attractive returns, whilst moderating volatility, through the business cycle. Our expression of market risk underpinning our tactical asset allocation tilts is transparently outline in our ‘Snowgum Quarterly’. These quarterly economic and investment updates provide a detailed insight into the economic outlook, and high level insight into investment activity within client portfolios.

Snowgum quarterly

Matt Vickers is principal adviser at Snowgum Financial Services.

Matt facilitates the wealth management, private banking and life insurance needs of professionals, business owners, senior executives and their families. Matt is an experienced conduit for inter-generational wealth management, strategic planning, entity optimisation and forms enduring partnerships with clients to ensure they consistently make sensible and smart financial decisions.

“Partnering with clients through a successful private equity exit or insurance claim, reflect the highs and lows of this uniquely rewarding profession” - Matt Vickers

Outside of finance, Matt volunteers with his local sporting club and spends time bushwalking, running, kayaking and skiing with his young family. In a time before finance (a long time ago), Matt was a ski instructor.

Qualifications & experience 

Matt founded Snowgum Financial Services in 2015. Prior to this he worked at a leading wealth management practice. Snowgum Finanical Services manages in excess of $70million in assets and a considerable client base of insured lives.

Matt is a Certified Financial Planner®, holds a Bachelor of Economics from the University of Sydney, Master of Applied Finance & Diploma of Mortgage and Finance Broking Management from Kaplan, is a Tax (Financial) Adviser (26140889) and a Member of the Financial Advice Association of Australia (FAAA) and Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia (MFAA).

Industry engagement

We would like to see improvements in financial literacy and better policy outcomes for consumers of financial advice. With that goal in mind, we have contributed to financial advice and tax policy discussions. Matt volunteers to provide financial literacy lectures several times.

Tax Reform - 10 November 2022

The Hon Stephen Jones MP was emailed the attached tax reform ideas.

In particular, consideration is being given to minimising misuse of superannuation tax concessions.

The main catalyst for sending tax reform information is the poorly designed superannuation surcharge tax on member balances above $3,000,000. There is no precedent for taxing unrealised wealth gains, and some inefficiency in seeking to do so.

Quality of Advice Review - 8 September 2022

Snowgum Financial Service provided a submission in response to Michelle Levy’s broad request for industry feedback on her interim report.

‘legal enshrinement’ on the term’s financial planner/adviser were raised.

We support continued efforts to increase professionalism and education of financial advice providers, but also make the delivery of advice more accessible to more consumers.

Amplification of Transmission - 28 August 2020

Monetary policy is poorly adapted to stabilising economic conditions as interest rates approach their lower bound.

The financialisation of investment markets accross all asset classes, funded by an accumulation of debt, in part because interest rates have being so low, increases the risk of monetary policy misstep.

We outline our thoughts for tweaks in approaches to the use of monetary policy. Some ideas were adopted (through pure coincidence) shortly after writing.