Commonwealth looks to internal growth

Tim Gunning

Commonwealth Financial Planning (CFP) has implemented an internal staff development program offering Commonwealth Bank employees a career path that will see them become financial advisers at its conclusion.

The program, called Adviser Gateway, is designed to boost planner numbers at CFP by taking advantage of the scale the bank enjoys in relation to its personnel.

“We find, given that we’ve got such a large organisation, that a lot of planners who are currently operating within CFP have actually come through other roles in the bank, and we want to encourage that. So it’s not just career pathing within CFP, it’s more broadly in the organisation,” said Commonwealth Bank general manager, network financial planning and distribution services, Tim Gunning.

The initiative is part of the bank’s broader Centre of Adviser Development functions and was launched in August this year.

The first intake for the program has comprised of 40 bank personnel, who will undergo six months training during which they will be taught a variety of skills.

“They’ll be put through the minimum requirements in terms of education standards, relationship rapport building training, and all those sorts of things,” Gunning explained.

“At the end of the program they’ll basically come out and be put through a continued program where we can move them into financial planning roles, or risk specialist roles, or whatever the case may be,” he added.

Gunning said the bank was potentially looking at running the program two or three times a year, depending on the outcome of the initial intake.

So far employee response to the scheme had been positive.

“It’s been really popular. We actually got over 250 applications, and we set some pretty high entry criteria in terms of time in the role. They had to have DFS 1, and they were subjected to some personality profiling. So that’s working well for us,” he said.

To complement the effort of growing the dealer group from within, CFP has also established a procedure to attract advisory talent from outside the bank.

“One of the other things we’ve recently built is a specialist recruitment function. We found we needed to support our financial planning managers in recruiting financial planners because they were spending a lot of time doing that and we want to get them to spend more time on mentoring and developing the planners within their teams,” Gunning said.

Built into the specialist recruitment scheme is a powerful personality profiling component.

“That’s not just the stuff you’d expect. What we’ve done is taken some of our successful planners and we’ve done a bit of work with them on determining what makes them successful and we’ve incorporated that into the program as well, which again is proving to be pretty good for us,” Gunning explained.