At one with the angels

Industry gladiators continue to fight about the relevance and impact of the new professional qualifications for financial advisers. But SIMON THOMPSON welcomes the new benchmarks.

Ever since it was launched in June 2006, the FSA’s proposals for radical reform of the retail distribution market in financial services have been the subject of violently contradictory assertions: widely endorsed as the best defence yet of consumer interests, and simultaneously condemned as the biggest barrier yet to genuinely independent advice except for those with the deepest pockets.  In this occasionally bloody arena of the industry’s irreconcilable gladiators, I’m delighted to say we’re on the side of the angels. For all of us at the Institute, one of the really pleasing things about the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) is the strong evidence it provides of the regulators’ determination finally to professionalise at least part of the industry (see Special Features pages).

To our minds, when the threshold of the new era is at last crossed at the end of 2012, it will have been long overdue. For, in fact, we’ll then be venturing towards levels of qualification and tests of competence which we ourselves established years ago as our own standards of professionalism. 

The same goes, more specifically, for the FSA’s insistence on the inclusion of ethics as a core requirement of conduct and behaviour among those offering professional advice on the whole range of savings, investments and protective products that so often bewilder and confuse ordinary consumers.

This, too, is something we introduced some time ago which speaks well of our long-standing campaign to raise awareness of standards of professionalism and ethics in the industry: it’s now starting to bear fruit.

The groundwork for this is by no means ours alone, of course. We work closely with other professional bodies like the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (CISI), who recognise the transferability of our qualifications for members – those advising private bank clients, for instance – who require CISI’s specialist training to deal with securities and derivatives.

The corporate and wholesale sides of banking have traditionally been strong supporters of professional qualifications. What’s now so gratifying is to see this welcome step in the same direction being encouraged in retail banking, too, just as new players like Tesco, Metro Bank, Virgin and others are entering the marketplace.

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