The Personal Finance Society has launched its Proficiency+ tool, designed to help firms align with the Financial Conduct Authority’s consumer duty and identify training opportunities.
According to Don MacIntyre, interim CEO for the PFS, the tool has been developed with practitioners and against real world scenarios to "ensure that all who use it can take tangible steps towards raising industry standards, building public trust, and facilitating the cultural shifts outlined in the FCA’s consumer duty guidelines".
The FCA’s consumer duty mandates high standards of conduct and behaviour towards customers, and requires firms to evidence this.
The PFS said these behaviours and expectations have been embedded within the tool as it employs situational judgement tests (SJTs) to evaluate an employees' ability to make appropriate decisions or judgments.
For each work scenario, users are asked to select the most appropriate response from a set of options.
They are then asked to gauge how certain they are that their answer is correct, using a confidence scale.
The Proficiency+ tool has been developed in collaboration with business-critical competency management Cognisco, alongside practising personal finance professionals.
The PFS said results offer insights into what employees do and do not understand.
The report provides an indication of which employees are going to apply the right or wrong behaviour in any given scenario, allowing firms to target training where it is needed the most.
Speaking at a press briefing, Vanessa Riboloni, professional capabilities and insight manager at the PFS, said: “We know that the culture of any firm is really difficult to define and the FCA acknowledges this and there is no single view of what a good culture looks like.”
However, she explained the CII and PFS have done a great deal of research in ascertaining and defining what good behaviours look like from a professional point of view.
“We've coded this work around behaviours in what is called the professional map, which is a competency framework that sets out the technical knowledge and the behaviours that professionals need to demonstrate to drive better customer outcomes,” she said.
“It's based on the principle that a well rounded professional is one that combines not only having technical expertise and technical skills, but also having the right behaviour so they apply that technical expertise in the right way and they make decisions through an ethical lens.”
Key benefits include the ability to identify the areas in which training should be prioritised, demonstrating to the FCA that the firm is actively investing in the necessary skills to drive good customer outcomes.
Riboloni said there are a number of behavioural areas such as impact, integrity, insight and inclusivity and, underneath each one of these segments, the PFS has broken down the specific behaviours that professionals need to demonstrate at different levels of seniority.
“We looked at the expectations set out by the FCA on what they're expecting of firms. This is all about ensuring that every aspect of the business is customer focused, that they offer value, that the products and services are needs based, and that they have a timely engagement with customers,” she added
She explained the City watchdog has given a degree of freedom on how firms interpret and apply these expectations so while the FCA sets out these principles for firms from the top down, the PFS and CII is setting out those standards of behaviours that complement and drive good customer outcomes.
How does it work?
The PFS said one of the reasons why it has developed Proficiency+ is to support advisers in having the right mix of skills and behaviours and that people are trained appropriately.
A test taker would take an online assessment and at the end would receive a personalised report highlighting strengths and weaknesses.
At the same time, the employer or the training manager would see an overarching aggregated report that pinpoints and highlights those areas of the business where targeted training is needed.
The pricing structure is on an assessment basis so if a firm decides to onboard 20 employees, the cost would be based on those 20 employees, but it's done on a case by case basis through a call with the business team.
The PFS explained that the FCA had not signed off on the tool during the development but the PFS had some conversations with different areas of the FCA.
“We have been in conversations with some firms and we've got a couple of firms that have piloted the tool,” Riboloni said.
“It's well received and it's plugging that gap from what we've heard in terms of up to the of July 31 of last year when firms were very much focused on ensuring that they had the right processes in place.”
The PFS said non members are also able to use the tool through an employer.
sonia.rach@ft.com
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