The problem overall is the risk and return/reward characteristics of all the investment advisors..
Simple breakdown, assuming you are well trained in financial analysis and advise, your expected salary can be, say, HK$500,000 p.a.
Private banking ROA (return on asset) are talking about between 0.8% ~ 1.0% p.a. If we follow this benchmark, then to make 500k p.a. you need 100x500k in assets = 50m HKD.
For a man on the street, and advising other man on the street, to amass 50m HKD of assets is not easy. How many guys are going to put in 1m of assets each for you ? The most you are going to get is maybe 200k HKD each. Then it means you need to have around 250 clients. That is going to take 3~5 years to amass.
Then, unlike a private banker where you can advise to 'churn' products, for most man on the street the products available to them is not really churnable and you end up needing to find at least 100~150 customers each year.
Which is impractical..
So to reduce the number of customers, from 150 down to, maybe, 30 per year.. the only way to help you make 500k for the year is to charge, 5x1% for these products..
So that's where the problem is..
How to solve it ? no idea... maybe it really has to be a social service provided by some government department or banks on a pro-bono basis.. otherwise, how can this conflict be solved ?
Its nothing to do with product.. but its the fundamental industry that is not proper.. Banks still charge 3~5% sales fees for mutual fund sold at the counter, in addition to the 1% p.a. kickback they receive as the distributor.