As part of its Wealth Management Project, which it began in 2014 with the aim of weeding out bad financial advisors, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission has banned Christopher Ramsay of Brisbane from providing financial services for five years.

ASIC imposed the ban on Ramsay for his failure to act in the best interests of his clients and the giving of inappropriate advice.

The regulator found that Ramsay failed in his obligations when he provided advice to his Westpac and NAB-subsidiary GWM clients to switch their superannuation and insurance products. In some cases he failed to spend enough effort to find out whether the clients' existing products met the clients' needs. In other cases, ASIC found that he provided misleading information to support his recommendations. For example, he included misleading fee comparison tables in advice documents which suggested that this-or-that recommended fund was cheaper than the clients' existing fund, when either this was not the case, or the fee structures he was comparing were dissimilar. He also put a misleading statement in an advice document which stated that the client's existing insurer did not offer income protection insurance, when it did.

As a consequence of Ramsay's failings, ASIC found that clients paid substantially more for some products than they had previously paid. In some cases, and to a significant degree, the higher cost of the products that Ramsay recommended reduced the clients' superannuation savings without the clients' knowledge.