Your IndustryJul 27 2016

Going the extra mile is a win-win

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There has been much debate in recent years about the point and purpose of continuing professional development (CPD).

While some advisers view the process as a box-ticking exercise, the majority have always paid close attention to keeping their knowledge up to date. Financial planning is a very knowledge-intense profession, and with laws and regulations changing all the time, keeping abreast of the latest pension changes or tax legislation is bread and butter for most.

But, like most things, the more you put into planning your CPD and wider professional development, the more you, your clients and your business will ultimately benefit. However, while CPD has become the buzzword for post-retail distribution review professional development, it is really just the element that maintains competence.

Former US president Franklin D Roosevelt famously said: “There are many ways of moving forward, but only one way of standing still.”

Today, the majority of professional advisers have a clear plan of action for meeting their commitment to CPD, but for those keen to advance their knowledge and skills, it is often hard to find the time to think more broadly about the best way to move forward from a wider professional development perspective. Thinking about our place in our chosen market inevitably brings the competitive environment into clearer focus and gets us thinking about demographic, cultural and technological change.

At the Personal Finance Society’s 2015 National Financial Planning Symposiums, futurologist Dr James Bellini offered some insights into how consumer behaviour was changing. He reminded us of the speed and impact of new and disruptive technologies impacting various sectors and leaving them unrecognisable in just a few years.

Many of us are now familiar with Uber, the huge international taxi-connection firm. Its uniqueness is down to the fact that it owns no taxis. Holiday booking is an industry that has quickly moved from the high street to the web, with Hotels.com being the biggest room-booking website in the world. Likewise, it owns no hotels.

At the same time, we are all familiar with the rapid demise of Blockbuster, the video store chain, driven out of business by a couple of new kids on the web, Netflix and LoveFilm, who made it cheaper and more convenient for us to watch the latest movies without leaving our favourite armchair.

I am not for a minute suggesting that financial advice is moving online. While there has been a lot of noise recently about so-called ‘robo-advice’, the ‘advice’ element is a bit of a red herring.

Robo is more about the new technologies available to support and streamline offline advice processes. While algorithms can create and rebalance investment portfolios based on assumptions about risk, and possibly add value in for simplified needs, they cannot provide sophisticated individuals with holistic financial planning.

The important thing is that advisers should not discount such advances as irrelevant to them and their clients. They must make sure they investigate and heed the changes that are afoot, give due consideration to synergies and assess the impact and opportunities for their own business.

Grandparents all over the world are Skyping or FaceTiming their grandchildren; the technologies improve every month and are ideal for a quick catch-up. Business versions such as Google Hangouts can offer more sophisticated sharing of presentations and documents. Are face-to-face reviews a thing of the past?

Rather than stand still (like Blockbuster), the advice profession must adapt and innovate, both to benefit from new and emerging technologies and to ensure it continues to deliver the appropriate proposition in a way that customers wish to interact with. If we do not, we can be sure others will.

Finding your best way forward might include improving some soft skills, taking advanced or specialist qualifications, forging links with professional connections or getting a little marketing support. It might even include a review of back-office processes or a cost benefit analysis of how a paraplanner could add value to your business.

Advisers can benefit hugely from sharing good practice and ideas with their peers, and do not necessarily have to reinvent the wheel to move forward. While ‘networking’ often conjures up images of more socially focused events, many forward-looking advisers formulise regular business networking groups and clubs with their peers to share information and ideas.

As your CPD planning and fulfilment becomes a hygiene factor, perhaps it might be a good time to give more thought to your broader professional development needs.

Mark Hutchinson is head of marketing of the Personal Finance Society