It will not have escaped your attention that the requirements for annual CPD are changing. From 1st January, under the incoming Retail Distribution Review (RDR) professionalism rules, all advisers must carry out 35 hours of activity a year.
The Financial Services Authority (FSA) estimates more than 70% of all advisers are already achieving this amount of CPD annually, yet the requirement has stirred debate.
Alistair Cunningham, financial planning director of Wingate Financial Planning, said he had recently met his annual requirement in a little under one month.
But Cunningham is not in favour of a significant increase in the hourly requirement, which will be assessed by accredited bodies when they renew advisers’ statements of professional standing (SPS) each year.
“I would probably nudge it up a little, but it certainly shouldn’t exceed 50 hours,” he says.
In preparation for the new requirements, many large adviser firms have started to hold accredited, in-house CPD assessments, courses and workshops. This is not a problem for big organisations, which have plenty of capacity. Smaller firms, however, do not have the time or resources.
Providers have attempted to help by offering training programmes. Schroders, for example, announced last month that it has been awarded Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) accreditation for its own gap-fill training programme for advisers. The training can be used to address any gaps and advisers can claim up to 6.5 CPD hours for each training programme.
Keri Carter, certified financial planner and director of Broadway Financial Planning, says the most important thing is for advisers to be prepared when it comes to CPD.
“For anyone not doing any CPD at the moment, it shouldn’t be too much of a hurdle if they approach it in an organised way.”
Her company decides at the start of each year what each adviser needs to do to cover all relevant sections, such as ethics and professionalism.
“Although 35 hours sounds like a lot if you have not been doing CPD before, it is just a week’s worth of work. If you write down everything you are doing which could qualify for CPD, then you shouldn’t have a problem.”
Alan Blunt, independent financial adviser at ICF Group, is a member of the Personal Finance Society (PFS) and tops up his CPD by attending meetings.
“The PFS meetings are well structured and it is not often where you go to a meeting and do not pick up some decent knowledge,” he says.
His firm runs regular “handy” workshops. Recently he attended a pensions workshop and was surprised to learn something new. “I’ve been in the industry 30 years; I thought I knew everything,” he says.
Each meeting counts for between four and five hours and going to four meetings a year counts for nearly all the structured CPD requirements.
Regular invitations from companies to go to presentations means it is not difficult to add up the rest of the hours. “I attend two or three company presentations a year,” he says.
Blunt says it is important to keep track of your CPD because the CII does check. “I had my CPD pulled up by the CII, but thankfully we had kept records or else I would have been in real trouble, so I know they check.”
