Compliance has been overtaken as the number one concern for advice practices by the climbing cost of doing business, research from CoreData has found.

The findings reveal that 26 per cent of advisers now highlight the rising cost of doing business as their primary fear, increasing from 11 per cent a year ago.

Conversely, the burden of compliance was by far the top priority last year which was cited by 21 per cent of advisers but that has decreased to 18 per cent.

Compliance became a big concern for advisers following the regulatory changes implemented due to the Hayne royal commission final report in 2019.

CoreData founder Andrew Inwood tells Professional Planner after the royal commission there was a heightened fear of breaching legislation and compliance rules.

“The compliance burden went from something that is interesting to something which was really important and took up a lot of their time, which fundamentally made businesses, particularly smaller businesses, unprofitable because they couldn’t get any scale,” Inwood says.