Vital Business Partners has appointed Craig Kouimanis to the newly created role of chief growth officer, the Australian financial planning outsourcing firm announced on 25 September 2026. He takes up the position in mid October and reports to chief executive Mark Fisher.
Kouimanis joins from Paragem, the licensee services business, where he was head of the firm. He had earlier been its general manager of practice development, arriving there after nine years at Securitor in state and national management roles. Before that he held senior positions at Commonwealth Financial Planning and Colonial First State.
Vital Business Partners supplies outsourced financial planning assistants, paraplanning, bookkeeping, accounting and mortgage broking support to Australian advice practices, delivered in large part from a Philippines based team. Its customers are the advice businesses themselves rather than end investors.
The creation of a growth role, and the choice of who fills it, say something about where that market has got to. Australian financial advice has spent the better part of a decade shedding advisers, and the practices that remain are carrying more clients each with the same or fewer staff. That has turned back office capacity from a cost line into a constraint on revenue, which is precisely the problem an outsourcing provider exists to solve.
Hiring from Paragem rather than from a competing outsourcer is the telling detail. Licensee services businesses sit between the practice and the product, and the person who ran one knows the economics of a planning practice from the inside: what a principal will actually pay for, which functions they will never let go of, and which licensees can introduce a supplier at scale.
The appointment is the second senior hire into the firm's leadership this year and the first in a position that did not previously exist, which suggests the company intends to sell rather than simply service.
Neither party disclosed the terms of the appointment.
The outsourcing model itself has become less contentious as the adviser shortage has persisted. Offshore paraplanning was once treated by Australian licensees as a compliance risk to be managed; it is now a standard part of how a mid sized practice scales, and the regulatory guidance has settled enough that the argument is about service quality rather than permissibility.
That shift is what creates the opening for a growth role. When a category is being defended, the senior hire is a compliance or operations specialist. When it is being sold, the senior hire is someone who knows the buyers. Vital Business Partners has chosen the second.
The company did not disclose the size of the team Kouimanis will lead.
