2026 Finalists
The ACS Aged Care Adviser of the Year Awards highlight Australian financial advisers and financial services businesses that demonstrate excellence in the aged care advice field. Each finalist has been put forward for the quality of their aged care advice at a time when the rules keep shifting, and clients keep asking harder questions. We are very proud to recognise the accomplishments of the 2026 award finalists, listed alphabetically within their respective categories.
Read our 2026 Award announcement: Announcing the 2026 Aged Care Adviser of the Year Award Finalists.
2026 Finalists
Award Category - Aged Care Adviser of the Year
This award recognises an individual adviser who is deemed to have demonstrated outstanding professional commitment in providing aged care advice to older Australians and their families.
Belinda Veriton
RFS Advice
A finalist in the Aged Care Adviser of the Year Awards in 2022 and 2024, Belinda Veriton is a Senior Financial Adviser and Accredited Aged Care Professional™ at RFS Advice. She has led the growth of RFS’s Elderly Care offering, built on her belief that families need guidance long before residential aged care is on the table.
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Her advice covers Support at Home, retirement living, Centrelink and estate planning, backed by client education resources, seminars and radio appearances. She has also spent considerable time vetting Support at Home providers across Southeast Queensland, so she can guide families with confidence. Shaped by growing up with elderly family members at home, Belinda starts with the person rather than the numbers and encourages families to plan early.
Leah Newman
Yield Financial Planning
A finalist in the Aged Care Adviser of the Year Awards in 2022 and 2025, Leah Newman is a senior financial adviser and Aged Care Team Leader at Yield Financial Planning, with more than 17 years in financial services and over eight years specialising in aged care. As an Accredited Aged Care Professional™, she pairs strategic advice with a hands-on Services Australia and Centrelink liaison service.
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Her involvement rarely ends once a client moves into care. In the six weeks before the 1 November 2025 reforms, Leah and her team advised eight new clients, delivering every strategy paper ahead of the deadline. Having fallen into aged care advice by chance, Leah says she cannot imagine working in any other area.
Nathan Fradley FChFP
Fradley Advice
Nathan Fradley is the founder of Fradley Advice, an independent firm built around emotionally and technically complex life transitions, including retirement, aged care, divorce, co-living and estates. He is also an Accredited Aged Care Professional™. With more than 15 years as an adviser, he brings a consultative approach to aged care to allow the client to make fully informed decisions.
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Nathan calls it “uncle-proofing”, enabling clients to have a clear understanding that would allow them to confidently explain their choices to family.
He shares his expertise widely through podcasts, including RetireRight and Weaving Gold, and conference appearances.
Shaun Ganguly CFP®
Aged Care Financial Planning
Shaun Ganguly is an Accredited Aged Care Professional™ and the founder of Aged Care Financial Planning, a practice that works exclusively in aged care and retirement funding advice. Shaun started the business after helping his own family through the aged care system and finding that, even with a financial background, the decisions around accommodation payments and care fees were hard to make sense of.
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That experience shapes how his whole team works with families, many of whom come to them under real pressure after a fall or with a hospital pushing for a decision. Every engagement starts with a conversation rather than a form, and the team stays involved well beyond the advice itself, working directly with care providers and Services Australia so families aren’t left to manage the paperwork alone.
Zachary Dodds CFP®
Muirfield Financial Services
The 2025 Aged Care Adviser of the Year and winner of the Aged Care Advice Excellence Award in 2024, Zac Dodds is a Certified Financial Planner® and Accredited Aged Care Professional™ who has been recognised in these awards every year since 2022. At Muirfield Financial Services in Geelong, Zac works with families facing some of the biggest financial decisions of their lives, turning complex rules into clear options they can understand and act on.
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Over the past year, he has taken that work further into the community, running education sessions at retirement villages, aged care services and libraries, and growing Muirfield’s local Aged Care Expo. He has also built a structured pro bono pathway so that families referred by hospitals and care providers can get specialist advice when cost would otherwise stand in the way. Inspired by the mentors who introduced him to aged care, Zac now mentors emerging advisers himself.
Award Category - Aged Care Advice Initiative of the Year
The Aged Care Advice Initiative of the Year category recognises a financial services business that is creating and undertaking aged care advice initiatives that advocate for and promote aged care advice to its clients or the wider community.
Alteris Financial Group
Alteris Financial Group returns as a finalist after winning the Aged Care Advice Initiative of the Year in 2025, adding to its wins in the same category (then known as Aged Care Advice Program of the Year) in 2022 and 2023. Its dedicated division, Alteris Lifestyle and Care, has specialised in aged care advice since 2014.
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When the new Aged Care Act took effect in November 2025, Alteris saw families receiving conflicting information about the new fees who they applied to. Alteris responded with an initiative that focussed on the people families usually turn to first, often weeks before an adviser is involved and Alteris built a structured education program for financial advisers, admissions and facility staff, and the public.
The team presented on the reforms to around 500 advisers, ran webinars for residential aged care facilities, co-delivered sessions with an aged care consultancy on the new Higher Everyday Living arrangements, and held community seminars on fees and the reforms. Plain English online content extended that reach to families doing the research on their own.
Alteris neither pays nor receives referral fees, so every referral comes from a partner who believes the advice is right for that family. Those referrals now arrive earlier and better qualified, while families still have genuine choices about accommodation payments and estate outcomes. Admissions staff tell the team they can spot the families who have received advice from Alteris because they arrive calmer and better informed.
Muirfield Financial Services
A finalist in this category for the third year running, Geelong-based Muirfield Financial Services spent the last year making quality aged care advice easier to reach, connecting community education, industry collaboration and referral networks with a pro bono advice pathway.
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At the centre of the initiative is Muirfield’s free annual Aged Care Expo, which grew this year to 48 stallholders and brought aged care providers, solicitors, health professionals, Centrelink, local council and government representatives under one roof. For many attendees, including people with no family to help them, it was a rare chance to speak directly with the professionals who could help.
The relationships built through the Expo and a local aged care networking group have since become a pathway into advice. Muirfield recognised that its long-standing pro bono offering wasn’t always reaching the people who needed it most, so it developed a simple referral tool that lets hospitals, charities and aged care providers request help on a family’s behalf without making the process intrusive. Referrals rose sharply once it was introduced.
The initiative has also opened a feedback loop between advisers, providers and government, giving Muirfield a way to raise emerging issues that families are facing. With demand for next year’s Expo already outstripping this year and more aged care education events appearing across the Geelong region, its influence is reaching well beyond the practice.
RFS Advice
Gold Coast-based RFS Advice, a finalist in these awards in 2022, spent the last year broadening its aged care advice into a wider Elderly Care service, recognising that many families were looking for guidance long before residential care was on the table. Questions about Support at Home, retirement villages, over-50s land lease communities, estate planning and family decision-making were coming up earlier and more often, and the Aged Care Act reforms only added to the uncertainty.
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To give clients sharper guidance on care at home, RFS reviewed Support at Home providers across South East Queensland through expos, industry engagement and direct meetings with providers. After extensive due diligence, it narrowed its preferred network to ten providers whose service standards and care philosophy matched what it expects for its clients.
Education sat at the heart of the initiative. Led by Belinda Veriton, a senior adviser, shareholder in the business and 2024 Aged Care Adviser of the Year finalist, the team developed practical resources on later-life decisions, ran a series of client seminars and partnered with community radio station 4CRB to host a public seminar. Belinda also kept the conversation going through regular radio and podcast appearances.
The biggest shift has been in when families come to RFS. Rather than meeting clients at a point of crisis, the team is increasingly helping them plan ahead while there is still time to evaluate their options. It reflects a belief that ageing well is about independence, dignity and family relationships as much as fees and accommodation choices.
Yield Financial Planning
Yield Financial Planning has seen first-hand how aged care is often overlooked until a decision becomes urgent, and the 2025 reforms left many families with even more questions about their options, the costs and where to turn. Its last-year initiative set out to reach people earlier, encourage them to plan ahead and make specialist aged care advice easier to find.
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Education did much of the work. Yield turned its free Aged Care eBook into an automated email series covering the new rules, conversations with family and decisions about the family home, and added a dedicated aged care section to every edition of its fortnightly newsletter. Its aged care web page was rebuilt as a resource hub, bringing guides, FAQs and regular articles together in one place and extending its reach well beyond the existing client base.
That online presence opened unexpected doors. A client care manager who found Yield’s content began referring residents and introduced the team to several aged care providers, where Yield supported families through key decisions in the weeks before the 1 November reforms. Visits to aged care homes and a partnership with a care placement service have since widened its referral network.
Inside the business, Yield built a dedicated aged care team that includes a Services Australia and Centrelink liaison officer, and trained its client experience staff to recognise aged care enquiries early. Demand has grown to the point where Leah Newman, a 2025 Aged Care Adviser of the Year finalist, now focuses solely on aged care advice and business development.
Previous Awards
For all the details on our previous finalists and winners, please click below.