Will new education standards quantify experience?
There are lingering questions about how the new education and professional standards for financial advisers will quantify the experience accumulated by a financial adviser who has been practicing for decades, according to the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA).
National president, Marc Bineham told a media briefing the industry required clarity on what would happen to those advisers who began their career decades ago when diplomas and degrees in financial advice and planning did not exist.
Speaking at the 2017 AFA National Adviser Conference at the Gold Coast last week about the AFA’s whitepaper on the financial advice competency framework, Bineham said he did not question the need for advisers to raise their minimum education requirements.
“For someone who is a 40-year adviser and who’s got all that experience and part of our whitepaper is how do we quantify that experience?” he asked.
“Yes you should have so much technical but then someone who’s just walked out of university to someone who’s been seeing people and built relationships for 40 years, you’ve got to be able to quantify that because it is appreciated by consumers.”
Bineham added that while the Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) reforms addressed investment advice and the incoming Life Insurance Framework (LIF) addressed life insurance advice, raising educational requirements for advisers was the final element of the package to raise consumer trust in advice.
“There is still a negative perception about what we do and we need to raise everyday Australians’ trust of our industry and as a profession and this is part of that,” he said.
“I think that package to help raise, we can go out and sort of say that we are raising that trust, and now education is the last piece of the puzzle that we need to help increase the trust factor with everyday Australians.”
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