More female chartered financial planners are needed to meet the needs of a diverse client base, a newly chartered planner has claimed.
Angie Taylor, chartered financial planner for Glasgow-based Independent Financial Advice World, said: “I still believe that there is a gap between the number of women and men that take charge of the [household] finances.
“This is also borne out by the number of female financial advisers within the financial services industry, which is still dominated by men. Therefore, female financial advisers are still very much in the minority – and especially chartered ones.”
Ms Taylor added that if women were looking to discuss sensitive financial issues, they might feel more comfortable speaking with an adviser of the same gender, so there was a need for more women to enter the industry.
According to latest figures from the CII – which recently welcomed Ms Taylor as a chartered financial planner – there are only 80 women in Scotland who are chartered financial planners.
Fewer than 1,000 women across the UK have become chartered financial planners, out of nearly 5,000 in total.
| CII chartered status: |
| 4,789 Chartered financial planners in the UK |
| 919 Female chartered financial planners across the UK |
| 377 Scottish chartered financial planners |
| 80 Female scottish chartered financial planners |
Source: CII as at end August 2015
This came as two senior deVere UK staff passed the CII’s revised pensions update programme (R08) exam.
Mitch Hopkinson, head of East Midlands for deVere UK, and Lee Grimshaw, head of technical development, passed the exam, which was updated in April following the launch of the pension freedoms earlier this year.
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Keith Richards, chief executive of the PFS, said: “We don’t have specific campaigns targeted at women, other than promoting emerging roles such as paraplanning, which is attracting a high percentage of women, some of whom will find their way into an advice role in future.
“A traditionally male-dominated advisory profession is changing as both the perception of it as a career and the more modern way of working is attracting more women.
