This year’s conference will take place on Thursday 23 May with a dinner the night before.  The venue is in Kenilworth near Warwick and the content includes many speakers and sessions requested by paraplanners. Full details of the programme are available on the IFP site here and you can also book online.  I hope to see many of you there.

Wizard Learning has been a supporter of this site for many years, especially with the Paraplanner of the Year, and we are pleased to return the favour with this post from them about the additions to their CPD system.

CPD must be more than just ticking the CPD boxes

The financial news element of our CPD SYSTEM provides advisers with concise and unbiased reporting of financial services related news and regulatory developments.

We research and analyse core information from a variety of sources including HMRC, FSA, ONS, government websites and press reports over the month. We then prepare a succinct online summary of the previous months most relevant finance related news and deliver this to you at the end of the month, together with a 10 question assessment to confirm your understanding. This counts as 1.5 hours of structured CPD each month.

Our aim is not only to provide you with the most up to date and relevant industry news, but to deliver and present this information to you in a format that helps you to assess its importance and relevance to you and your clients. So, with this in mind, each of our monthly news summaries are conveniently separated into 8 subject headings: compliance, economy, mortgages, pensions, protection, savings & investments and taxation & trusts and ‘miscellaneous’.

You no longer have to read numerous lengthy reports, news articles and press releases to find the key facts that you need to know. We know from the extensive research that we carry out to prepare our monthly summaries how tedious and time-consuming this can be and, as they say, time is money. So we do all of that for you; sifting out the spin, speculation and biased opinions, giving you just the pertinent and relevant facts that you can’t afford to miss. Our summaries are succinct, relevant and interesting and will save you a considerable amount of time each month. Furthermore, the time you spend reading them, along with assessment results are included on your CPD certificate.

There’s more – 16 online courses

In addition, our CPD SYSTEM provides you with access to 16 online courses; an extensive and invaluable library of material amounting to 314 hours of CPD, around which you can plan your own annual CPD requirements. See here for full details of the contents.

All of this information is at your fingertips, easily accessible on our online system, where you cannot only view the most recent uploads, but also the news summaries for the previous six months.

Wizard Financial Awareness

As an added benefit, financial advisers who subscribe to the CPD system this month will be invited to create an adviser profile which will appear on our consumer information website. This will be FREE OF CHARGE for at least the next 9 months.

The Wizard Financial Awareness information website is designed to enhance awareness of money and financial issues among the general public, giving them a greater understanding of the products they may already have, or that may be recommended to them by a financial adviser, and to help them to identify financial needs that they may not previously have been aware of.

Users of the site can contact any of the financial advisers featured on the site to discuss the issues and topics featured, or to seek advice regarding their own personal circumstances.

CPD must be more than just ticking the CPD boxes

It is emerging that the focus of the new regulatory bodies – PRA/FCA – will be on advisers taking their continuous professional development more seriously, and not just treating the requirement to keep their knowledge up to date as a tick-box exercise. Some firms view CPD as a necessary evil, but while ensuring that they meet the minimum time requirements to comply with the regulations might have been acceptable until now, the new regulatory regime requires firms to set clear benchmarks for competence, and use these to drive training requirements and CPD planning.

Our online course and use of assessments to confirm knowledge provides a quantifiable benchmark for technical competencies that can drive each adviser’s training needs and plans, and that will satisfy the requirements of the regulators under the new regime.

More information and discounts

For more details on our CPD SYSTEM see our information page here  Discounts are available for multiple users; please contact us with the number of users that would require access for details of the savings that can be made. We can also provide you with trial access, if required. Please confirm your username or register here  if you don’t already have an existing record.

Would a Summer gathering of paraplanners at a teepee-based professional powwow tempt you?

I’m contemplating the creation of a paraplanner-only event where outsourced and in-house paraplanner tribes can mingle and share tales of best practice, swap stories and listen to opinion-leading chiefs.

An informally enlightening and entertaining event where paraplanners can meet with paraplanners and confer about the challenges facing our profession.

An event that is independent of any professional bodies and takes place in the Summer months.

In the countryside.

In a teepee.

(With a feast, of course.)

A Paraplanners Powwow.

Find out more here.

The annual award is back for its fifth year and registrations are now being taken.  The closing date for entries is 24 September and the main award includes a cash prize of £1,000 and a full attendance package at the IFP Conference in October.  You could join the previous winners and also find out more information on the site here.

I am Richard Allum and I am standing for election to the Board of the IFP.

I am a paraplanner; a role that – just ten years ago – barely existed.

Ten years from now, I hope it will enjoy professional respect in all quarters of the financial services community and beyond.

But this is not a self-serving ambition.

I believe that, with its increasing presence in the delivery of advice for financial planning practices, paraplanning must aspire to standards of professional conduct and competence that are at least as demanding as those for financial advisers themselves – and be seen to achieve them.

For financial planning professionals to inspire consumer trust and confidence in financial advice, they must be able to rely on professional standards of paraplanning which they can trust.

A significant presence among the IFP’s growing membership, is a generation of paraplanners who – more often than not – are young, eager to learn and bring a wealth of ideas and perspectives to the financial planning community.

And, by their association with the IFP, this generation is clearly mindful of the importance of professionalism.

Just as the IFP has been instrumental in spearheading the pursuit of higher professional standards for financial planning, I believe it has an enormous role to play in shaping and influencing standards to which this generation of paraplanners can aspire.

It is the IFP’s ability to bring together practitioners, with a shared ambition and determination to pursue ever higher professional standards in financial advice, that makes it unique.

It would be privilege for me if you would consider casting your vote for me; to allow me the opportunity to help shape commonly shared professional standards for paraplanning and for paraplanning to play its part in fulfilling the professional reputation of financial advice in the UK.

The deadline for voting is 5pm on Friday 21 September. The results will be announced at the IFP’s annual general meeting taking place at Celtic Manor Resort, Newport, on Monday 1 October 2012.

Wizard Learning have been supporters of The Paraplanner and in particular Paraplanner of the Year and have launched a new RDR online course which provides support for:

• Qualifications – exactly what advisers will need in the new world and how long they have to complete their training
• Gap fill and CPD – the new standards for CPD are fully explained
• The workings of SPS
• Independent or restricted – full information translated in as simple as possible terms to enable you to make an informed decision and keep your firm on track once the decision is made
• Avoid or prepare for a potential VAT pitfall
• Understand the vulnerabilities and how you can protect trail income
• Thought provoking discussion on service proposition to help yours to evolve
• Capital adequacy, what you need to be ready for
• Record keeping that will make sure you can complete your Gabriel returns with ease.

This is a useful CPD resource and you can find out more information here.

threesixy has announced some more events which are open to all paraplanners and will take place in several locations throughout the UK.  You can find out more and reserve a place here.

The IFP has announced details of this year’s conference taking place on 24 May in Nottingham. Last year’s event was a great success and this year it looks even better with some great speakers lined up.

Having said that, the best thing about this event is the chance to meet other paraplanners from all sorts of backgrounds, share experiences and make lasting contacts. I’m going and it would be good to see and meet as many of you as possible.

If you are going please add a comment below and we can say hello.  Full details are available here.

Over the weekend we moved the site to a new, faster server in advance of some new features. Unfortunately we ‘lost’ some of the users who joined the forum during February and also all forum posts this month too.  Sorry about that.  If you try to log in and can’t please sign up again and then follow these instructions.

Wizard Learning has been very helpful to this site over the years and has just published a new presentation on this subject. With the RDR implementation date less than 12 months it is well worth watching and can be found here to make sure you are aware of the professionalism and gap fill requirements that advisers need to have in place by 1 January 2013.

The presentation covers all these professionalism and gap fill requirements:

• Appropriate and transitional qualifications
• Accreditation and accredited bodies
• Identifying knowledge gaps and gap filling
• Statement of Professional Standing (SPS)
• CPD requirements
• CPD and gap fill solutions