AFA membership to require extra education
From 1 July this year the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) will require all new adviser members to attain the Associate Chartered Financial Practitioner (AChFP) designation, AFA national president Brad Fox told an AFA partners briefing yesterday.
The only additional study required to gain the AChFP for those already with a diploma of financial planning (DFP) is the AFA's ethics unit.
Financial advisers joining the AFA will be provisional members and will need to complete the ethics unit within 12 months of joining, he said.
"The beauty of completing this one unit is you'll be an AChFP. It's got credibility and it's got some standing around it," Fox said.
The AFA was currently at an inflexion point at the "pointy end" of the FOFA process and needed to switch from fighting to leading, he said.
"We've got an enormous competitive tension that's going to confront our advisers and some of the product players - between efficiency and customer intimacy," he said.
He said there was a margin squeeze on at the foot of the value chain, with a competitor in the market to traditional financial advice in the form of scaled advice, he added.
"We've got a big role to play in a leadership position to take people out the other side of FOFA," he said, adding the AFA needed to be at the forefront of that process.
Fox said the AChFP was one of the three levels of designation offered by the AFA, which also included the group's premier designation - the Fellow Chartered Financial Practitioner (FChFP) - and the Chartered Life Practitioner.
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