Rod Edge, head of education & capability development at AMP, welcomes contenders in the 2016 AMP University Challenge
Halfway through a meeting to run through a statement of advice (SoA) with clients Angela and Dylan, the phone rings. It’s their son, Josh, recently returned from overseas. He’s in danger of having his car repossessed unless he can come up with $25,000, pronto. His parents, immersed in a discussion about superannuation consolidation, paying off their home loan and the pros and cons of mortgage-offset accounts, are flummoxed. What should they do?
Such a call might put even a seasoned professional off her stride, so it might seem downright sadistic to pitch a curve ball like that at a financial planning student engaged in a what is already a tricky role-playing scenario. But this was precisely the sort of obstacle participants in the 2016 AMP University Challenge had to overcome if they wanted to claim first prize.
This year’s challenge attracted more than 680 entrants, who were whittled down through a series of assignments and tests to 181 individuals in 85 teams, before five teams made up of 12 students were selected to take part in the full-day final at AMP’s headquarters in Sydney on October 28.
Over the course of the day, students were put through their paces on technical knowledge, industry insights and client engagement. In the final analysis, a team of three students from Deakin University were crowned the winners, ahead of teams from the University of Sydney, the University of Wollongong, a second team from Deakin, and a team from Monash University.
To get the nod, teams had to impress a panel of seasoned judges: Dr Mark Brimble, Professor of Finance at Griffith University; Financial Planning Association chief executive Dante De Gori; Aspire Wealth Creation principal and wealth coach Lisa Barber; and Wealth Partners Financial Advisers principal and financial adviser Andrew Heaven.
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A process that starts in February
AMP has run the university challenge each year for the past six years. The final represents the culmination of a process that begins for the students in February, and in some cases is now embedded into the university curriculum.
It has evolved from its earliest iteration, and AMP’s academy and education manager Louise Trevaskis says she would like to see it develop further.
“It’s a little bit too early to [say] where we want it to go on the day,” she tells Professional Planner, when the 2016 challenge is over.
“But looking short term, we would love more unis to participate in the game and more students to participate. We have a lot of strong academic support, [some] who embed it as a formal assessment. Something that isn’t known is for students entering this game, it counts towards their degrees at some unis, which I think is fabulous. It means they get a double tick – they get whatever percentage of their assessment, and they get to come and play this as well.”
A phone call midway through the SoA presentation this year is a new development, and Angela and Dylan (Horizons recruitment consultants Liz Singleton and Jason Taylor) play their roles convincingly.
“I don’t think they had any curly situations thrown at them in year one, and this year, as you saw today, we’ve got multiple curly ones,” Trevaskis says.
But at least the character concerned should have been familiar.
“It was actually planted in their fact-find,” Trevaskis says.
“We pretend that they have met the client for a first time, and we send them a big fact-find – an AMP fact-find. Some of them have never seen one before, but it’s got all the story, including fact that Josh is adopted – it’s interesting that no one raised that – and we wanted to get the blended family thing going. They didn’t pick that up in their recommendations, but then, we didn’t get them to go into estate planning or anything like that. I’d love to put them under more improvisation on the day, in that twist.”
More than just the experience on the day Trevaskis says that to help students get more from participating than just the experience on the day, this year they were videoed while taking part.
“We’ve never done that before,” she says. “Again, it’s to help them develop, and to refine and reflect. So, next week, their coach [see table] will call them. We’ll send [the video] to them, they’ll watch it and then they’ll have another debrief after they’ve watched themselves. What did they learn? What did they do well? Celebrate the wins and then, what can they improve on? We want them to walk away with skills and insight that they might not be aware of.
“It’s very pleasing to see it come to life on the day. The other thing that’s new today is they’ve seen the AMP Goals Explorer Centre, so they’ve seen the future of advice, and no other university students have been through that. We try to step it up a level each year.”
Marc Olynyk, a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University, says the challenge brings a practical dimension to financial planning studies that universities themselves can struggle to replicate.
“The practical application of what they are learning, and putting it into a practical situation, is a really good opportunity for the students,” he says.
“They can learn a lot in class from a theoretical viewpoint, but being able to put it into a practical case study, I think is a great opportunity for students. And the ability to put it in front of industry representatives to showcase their talent, get feedback on what they did and what worked, I think is a great opportunity. It’s really around the application of that knowledge.”
The University Challenge takes students out of their comfort zone figuratively, by asking them, for example, to improvise during the case study role-playing session. But it takes them out of their comfort zone literally as well by putting them into an unfamiliar setting, dealing with unfamiliar – and in some instances quite intimidating people – including established and respected financial planners, leading academics, and the head of the peak industry association.
“We do a bit of preparation for the students,” Olynyk says.
“They had to do an SoA; they’ve done the AMP Challenge. As well as that, students have to present their SoA to practitioners. So we prepare them to present their SoA to a practitioner, which puts them out of their comfort zone. But this is a really good challenge, and it really prepares them well for the workforce, where they have to think on their feet. It’s an unfamiliar environment, you never know what the client is going to ask.”
Engagement is critical for career choice
Olynyk says engaging students is critical to getting them to think about financial planning as a viable career choice. It continues to struggle to compete with the likes of accounting to attract students.
“What we find is the more we can do with students to engage them with industry, the more we’re able to engage them into thinking that financial planning is the career choice for them,” Olynyk says.
“Previously it might have been accounting. So the more we can get them engaged with business, the more we can get them to crystallise their thinking around financial planning as a career of choice.”
Each member of the winning Team MDM – Megan Cull, Daniel Petrov and Mitchell Bogdanov – each intend to pursue a career in financial planning. Cull will be following in her father’s footsteps – and this relationship stood her in good stead when it came time for her to present the SoA to Angela and Dylan.
“Since we found out that we’d been accepted in the top five, I’ve been preparing,” Cull says.
“We were lucky – because Deakin does their exams so early, I finished my exams two weeks ago, whereas some of the other people here today have their exams next week. I had free time to prepare for this.
“So I could sit down with Mum and Dad and say, ‘you’re Dylan, you’re Angela; I’m going to present you a statement of advice, so ask me questions you think someone would actually ask’. Dad is at Apt Wealth in Geelong.
“I still did the work on my own but it was good to run things past Dad: ‘does this sound OK? How would you phrase this to a client without coming off a bit rude, or something like that’.”
Cull’s “curly” issue was an unexpected opportunity for Angela and Dylan to buy an investment property, for which they’d need to raise $50,000 by next Tuesday.
“We practiced probably only twice, maybe three times, but when I was in the role play, Dylan and Angela threw something that I wasn’t prepared for, so I was thinking on my feet,” Cull says.
“I was like: ‘No, you don’t want to spend $50,000 on an investment property!’ But I had to say it in a way that wasn’t going to get me into trouble.”
Who wants to be a financial planner?
Bogdanov represented his team in the opening session of the challenge, the Who Wants to be a Financial Planner quiz, modelled on Who Wants to be a Millionaire: 20 questions, covering superannuation, tax, insurance and general knowledge.
The competition was close and at the end of the quiz only five points separated first from fifth. The quiz made up 20 per cent of the teams’ final scores, and Team MDM wasn’t leading.
“I just used my general knowledge,” Bogdanov says. “I tried to do some revision, but because it was so broad I didn’t know what to do, really. When I answered the questions I was on the spot and sometimes I put in the wrong answer. When I reflected on it I realised I knew it, but because of the short timeframe I didn’t know
the answer at the time.”
Who was to take part in the quiz was between “me and Daniel, because we’re the least confident in speaking”, Bogdanov says.
“He said he’d [do the speech]. Megan is the confident one. I think my technical knowledge is pretty good.
“I think the last five questions were pretty confusing. It’s like an exam: they always put in one difficult question to separate [the marks].”
Bogdanov says the questions were a fair reflection of what a student ought to know at this stage of study.
The final part of the assessment required Petrov to place himself in 2021 and look back over the five years since 2016 to explain the factors that had led financial planning to increase its penetration from one in five adult Australians to four in five.
Petrov’s speech covered the tax-deductibility of fees, tighter restrictions on the age pension requiring more peopled to take control of their own finances, higher education, professional and ethical standards for planners, and the impact of technology in making advice more affordable and easier to deliver.
Petrov says this year at university is “the first year … we’ve had exposure to all the subjects, like economics and finance”.
“And after that we had to choose a major and it was financial planning that appealed to me,” he says.
Each member of Team MDM plans to pursue a career in financial planning, and the University Challenge has reinforced that decision.
“It showed you the emphasis on customer service skills and how that’s relative in the industry,” Bogdanov says.
Petrov says that day had “more of a practical sense to it, whereas uni is more theory based”.
And Cull says that the role-playing session was, “other than presenting to our teacher … the first time that I’ve ever had to present something like this to someone else”.
“It was the first time I’ve been in a client environment,” she says. “Maybe uni could focus on more things like this, to get us prepared. Really, going into it today, if I hadn’t practised with Dad, maybe I wouldn’t have got this outcome.”
Developing future talent for the profession
Trevaskis says that ultimately, the aim of the challenge is to “develop future talent for the profession – and we definitely did that”.
“It’s also for them to get some fun into their day because it is stressful for them,” she says. “We do want them to have a learning experience, have some fun and also get the opportunity to network with various people they might not normally – like the judges, executives, media, etcetera.”
Trevaskis says AMP is prepared to help any university challenge finalist who wants to pursue a career in financial planning.
“AMP has an academy that anyone can apply to if they’re studying at uni or have finished their university degree,” she says.
“And I know a couple of them asked about it today. It’s by no means the purpose of today, but sometimes they are interested in working with AMP. And as you heard throughout the day, some of them are not sure what they want to do just yet, and that’s OK – we’re hopefully enticing them into financial planning over the years.”
How the teams placed1stTeam MDM 2ndAbercrombie Financial 3rdTeam Erika 4thR&C Wealth Management 5thStep Up |
