A graduate recruitment program and mandatory Certified Financial Planner (CFP) status for all of its planners from 2019 are key elements in an ambitions plan by StatePlus to significantly expand its financial planning presence.

The former State Super Financial Services, rebranded as StatePlus as of Thursday last week, currently has about 160 financial planners and just over half of them are CFP-qualified. The remainder are actively working towards attaining the qualification.

The company’s announced expansion plan follows a $50 million transformation of the business, which included full digitalisation of all previously paper-based records, the integration of systems to underpin the delivery of advice, and the creation of multiple channels for providing advice to clients.

The managing director of StatePlus, Michael Monaghan (pictured), says the business benchmarks itself against a range of organisations around the world, and increasingly against major professional services firms. Monaghan says this will only become more relevant as financial planning evolves further towards becoming a profession itself.

It is a critical part of StatePlus’ strategy to recoup the cost of its transformation that it operates efficiently and is profitable based solely on delivering advice. The chairman of StatePlus, Peeyush Gupta, says the business enjoys a cost-to-income ratio of about 50 per cent, which means it can expand its advice reach by offering its advice capability profitably to other superannuation funds in future, without relying on revenue from product to support it.

Bolstering female numbers

The general manager of human resources for StatePlus, Tracy Murphy, says the graduate recruitment program will begin in July next year, and it will help the organisation source planners for its 18 regional offices as well as bolstering the number of females in its planning ranks. At the moment about 35 per cent of its planners are female.

Murphy says all StatePlus financial planners must be members of the Financial Planning Association (FPA), and all incoming planners will be required to join the association, if they have not already.

She says setting high standards is both integral to StatePlus’s development as a professional services firm, but at the same time presents recruitment challenges, which the graduate programme is designed to address.

“We have a vision in StatePlus that by 2019 all of our financial planners will hold the CFP qualification,” she says.

“About 55 per cent of our planning population already hold the CFP. All of our other planners are either on their way to attaining their CFP, or they are about to embark in that. We’ve worked hard to build individually tailored education pathways with organisations like Charles Sturt University on order to get all of our financial planners [CFP-certified].”

Only CFPs

Murphy says that earlier this year StatePlus decided to only recruit financial planners who are CFP-qualified.

“On principal that was the right decision for us to take, but in reality it did pose a strategic challenge for us,” she says.

“We were limited in the group we could go for, and we weren’t just looking for people with the highest qualification, they need to have the right attributes to come and work for us as well.”

Murphy says there are currently about 23,000 “financial planners” in Australia, of which about 5500 are CFPs.

“We also know that the demand for financial planning advice will increase over the next few years – and I read a report from the FPA that it will go up by 55 per cent in the next few years,” she says.

“That gives us a real challenge as an industry.

“We know that increasing education standards is something that we absolutely need to do, and is vital to lifting that professionalism piece. Where will those new planners come from, how do we as an industry grow numbers, and how do we lift that professionalism?”

Opportune time to recruit

Murphy says that following the transformation program and rebranding it is opportune time to “start to attract people to our organisation”.

“We’ve got a project team working on a graduate recruitment program, so we can absolutely ensure that we’ve got the best possible talent to come through, and then support them through to CFP,” she says.

“It also gives us an opportunity to target our regional office network. We don’t have an issue at all with obtaining planners in the Sydney basin, but we have 18 regional offices, so what we will do with that graduate scheme is target [growing] numbers out in the regional offices.

“It also gives us an opportunity to start to look at bringing some more females into our planning population, and start to grow our female financial planners.

“One of the things we’ll do first of all is target some of our internal client service officers. We’ve worked hard to make sure the support functions are professional and we’ve recruited people who have got the right qualifications, a relevant degree, knowing…they might like to go on to be financial planners.”

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