The challenge to meet ethics requirements

Organisations have highlighted it is “quite a challenge” for advisers to achieve nine hours of ethics and professionalism CPD and for them to provide the content.

Speaking to Money Management, commentors acknowledged there was a limited pool of ethics content for members to work from.

Financial advisers had to do 40 hours of CPD annually which included nine hours of CPD of ethics and professionalism. However, in several submissions to the Quality of Advice Review, advisers mentioned this was difficult to complete and questioned why the total was so high compared to other professions.

General practitioner lawyers had to complete 10 hours per year, accountants had to do 120 hours over three years and surveyors had to complete around between 15-20 hours per year.

It was also higher than the other three categories – technical competence, client care and practice, regulatory compliance and consumer protection – which were five hours each.

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Ben Marshan, head of policy, strategy and innovation at the Financial Planning Association of Australia (FPA), said the FPA had a large library of CPD materials available but that ethics stood out as being hard to source material.

“It is easy for us to find 5-10 hours of ethics material for CPD but to find enough to cover nine hours, this would require 10-20 hours of material and you want to give them variety,” he said.

“There’s not a lot of ethics experts in Australia, especially for financial services, so it becomes difficult to find new topics.”

Caz Garrard, education manager at the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA), said: “It is quite a challenge to do nine hours, it’s odd considering the minimum for the other sectors is five hours.

“It depends what content is available from their licensee, we find webinars are the most popular with our members and ethical dilemmas are a popular topic.”

Commentors said ethical dilemmas, client complaints, code of practice and code of ethics were popular topics within the category and Marshan reminded advisers could also include professionalism content in their hours, not exclusively ethics.

From the perspective of an education provider, Kaplan said it currently had 25 hours of content in this space and updated it monthly.

Brian Knight, Kaplan chief executive, said: “Our focus is to make the content practical, relevant and applicable to financial advisers. We do this by providing case studies and scenarios that represent real-life situations advisers may face in their professional practice.

“There are also plenty of examples and situations from other industries and sectors which can be examined, but again, the focus is ensuring it’s contextualised and relevant to financial advice. For example, we’ve just released a module on the Crown Casino investigation, which looked at the influence of culture within an organisation and what can go wrong.”

He said he believed the requirements, which had been updated following the Royal Commission, were “about right” given the past examples of unethical behaviour in the sector.

“Ethics and professionalism is a knowledge area that needs to be revisited and reinforced on an ongoing basis. The feedback we get from advisers is that they want content that will continue to challenge and push their thinking because it helps them to constantly reflect on their organisational culture.”