The Professional Planner Dealer Group Summit 2014 heard that making the right connections will create an environment where a profession can flourish, where the quality of advice will improve, and where high-calibre new entrants are encouraged to see financial planning as a long-term career.
Creating or improving links between different parties in the financial planning chain is essential to creating a framework in which a profession can flourish, and which will attract high-calibre newcomers to its ranks, the Professional Planner Dealer Group Summit 2014 has concluded.
The Summit heard that tapping into a growing body of knowledge being created within academic institutions and creating clearer pathways from university into the profession would form the bedrock of the emerging profession.
Convergence of mortgage broking and accounting with “traditional” financial planning was likely to open up financial planning to a wider segment of the population; but it would not happen
without also throwing up significant challenges to existing financial planning models.
Meanwhile, rethinking of the role of technology would underpin the provision of advice solutions in a way that leads to greater satisfaction for both financial planners themselves, and their clients.
“There’s an opportunity for the industry that really hasn’t [been exploited] so far, and in particular by the larger players in the industry, to work more closely with tertiary institutions to devise degrees or courses or pathways for students to be excited about and interested in entering the industry,” the Summit heard.
“Part of that is not just university courses, but post-that, we talked about the lack of mentors in the industry that would enable students finishing courses, as they entered their first jobs, to have somebody who could mentor them and help them and guide them through the first stages of their careers.”
The Summit heard that the industry needs closer collaboration with universities and other tertiary institutions.
“The development of the soft skills of students is really important as they go through that first phase of studies,” it heard.
“Client engagement becomes really important after that, and there needs to be collaboration between industry and academia. But what’s very important here is that we have to agree on a body of knowledge for the industry. If you want to ‘belong’ – like accountants or lawyers or doctors – you’ve gone through a series of events which you share. You’ve gone through university; you’ve done an internship, et cetera. Until we, all of us, feel we belong to that same sort of pathway, it’s going to be very difficult to be ‘professional’, because we don’t see ourselves that way.
“We want to see barriers to entry even higher, where possible. It has to start somewhere, and unfortunately, the current [new entrants] have to suffer and start at a higher level. But we want to reinforce that.”
The development of a fully-fledged profession can “only be done with a very close relationship with academia, which is founded in university courses”, the Summit heard.
“Research from academia is just starting and is great, and we need to see a great body of work in that space. Locking in the connectivity that exists between academia, education and the practical application of that – those three things coming together will help us on the path to professionalism and truly thinking about where that information is coming from and how we can use that for the opportunity for the client experience.
“We’d also like to see greater partnering with academia around policy and product development.”
Read the full review of Professional Planner Dealer Group Summit 2014 in the July issue, out now.
