Parameters need to be in place with the adviser experience pathway to prevent young advisers with minimal experience from qualifying for the exemption, according to the Financial Planning Association of Australia (FPA).
Speaking at a roundtable, FPA chair, Marisa Broome, said the association had received around 2.5k responses to its consultation on the experience pathway, representing more than 20% of its membership.
This would see advisers without degrees but with more than 10 years of experience exempt from the education requirements and only required to complete an ethics module.
The issue had “polarised” the membership, she said, with members unanimously agreeing it was a backwards step. While they agreed there had been a lack of recognition for advisers’ experience in the past, they disagreed the proposal was the right way to go about rectifying this.
Specifically, there was poor support for the 10 and 12-year pathway and members felt it was a backwards step to implement.
Broome said: “It could mean that an adviser aged 30 with 10 years experience could practice for another 30 years without any adequate formal tertiary qualifications. For attracting new entrants and for general professionalisation can’t be good for a consumer perspective. You need to have some parameters around who qualifies for the experience pathway.
“You can’t expect to go on forever where you can do a two-day course to be a financial planner, that’s not appropriate.
“Prior to FASEA [Financial Advisers Standards and Ethics Authority] there were no CPD requirements, they had no ongoing education requirements until FASEA came into play and that can’t be called a profession.”
FPA chief executive, Sarah Abood, who took over in January from Dante De Gori, said another proposal the organisation had was around specialisations but that further discussion was needed.
“If you are a planner who only practices in one area, then perhaps there’s an opportunity for us to recognise that. When we talk about specialisation, there are two ways of looking at that; one is that is a specialist designation where everyone is a financial planner and some have an extra specialist designation or is it in the sense of practicing in a specific area?
“I think we need more conversations and what the impact would be on the profession. That conversation needs to be had about what those areas might be.”
