Rank the Energy Retailer Project

A big thank you to all financial counsellors across Australia, for their support and participation in the Rank the Energy Retailer 2025 survey, with the survey closing in in mid-April.

FCVic is very grateful to our Victorian member financial counsellors who gave us their time and valuable insights in completing the survey, thank you!

Our next step for the Rank the Energy Retailer project is to analyse the wealth of data from the survey.

Right now, our project partner Consumer Policy Research Centre is analysing the survey responses nationally, and our project funder and partner Energy Consumers Australia is preparing analysis of regulatory data (AER data) to contextualise the survey insights. We are looking forward to finding out how financial counsellors have ranked energy retailers in the survey, and sharing the findings and recommendations from the analysis. FCVic and our project partners Financial Counselling Australia, Energy Consumers Australia and CPRC hope the report will improve the experiences of energy consumers who are in hardship, and financial counsellors working on energy casefiles nationally.

In exciting news, we have just set a date for our Rank the Energy Retailer Report Launch – to be held on Monday 16 June 2025 in Melbourne’s CBD and hosted online. Please save the date 16 June for our Report Launch, with details to follow soon!

Workforce Development Project

FCVic’s Workforce Development Project is well underway, and we are delighted to have received a number of draft reports with insights from our consultants, based on the data and evidence gathered from the Victorian financial counselling sector earlier in the year. We acknowledge the work of Victorian financial counsellors, agency managers and other stakeholders in contributing their views, experiences and insights on the financial counselling profession – it has been vital for the project.

In recent weeks, our Project Steering Committee and FCVic have been busy reviewing and providing feedback to the consultants on their draft reports, in particular the Impact Economics and Policy’s report, ‘The Economic and Social Impact of Financial Counselling’, and the draft Caseloads Guidance from Bartley Consulting.

Next, our consultants from WIDI at RMIT, will compile the various streams of project work along with their own research findings to create a draft Workforce Strategy. We are looking forward to reviewing the draft Workforce Strategy in May, and in time sharing the findings and launching the Strategy later this year.