James Kenny empowers the next generation of planners

James Kenny’s passion for educating up-and-coming stars of the profession saw him take home the 2013 Financial Planner of the Year award, Kate Cowling reports. 

For a profession that’s constantly undergoing change, the financial planning realm is notoriously difficult to crack for the new generation of advisers, Tupicoffs’ James Kenny believes. 

Perhaps it is because university degrees are still grounded in theory, or because there is a general lack of mentor programs, but either way, more needs to be done to open up the profession to graduates, Kenny said. 

“For people who don’t have experience it can be really difficult to get a foot in the door … especially if your goal is to move into the boutique market,” he told Money Management. 

“Often, if you are looking to get into the profession, it’s going to be down that back route into the corporate world, then trying to make the transition from corporate to boutique can be a bit difficult.”

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Kenny said it’s “uniquely difficult” for young people, who are often not taken seriously by retirees. 

“But if you’ve had those opportunities to be mentored properly and have had good training, you can overcome a lot of those preconceived notions,” he said. 

It was Kenny’s crusade to change the course for the next generation, as well as his commitment to high professional standards, that won the 35-year-old the 2013 Money Management Financial Planner of the Year award. 

Over the last year, the Brisbane-based planner has volunteered as a guest speaker at several Financial Planning Association (FPA) Young Planner events and presented a technical workshop at the FPA National Congress in Sydney last month. 

He also supported the Griffith University Professional Degree for Financial Planning, mentoring students and volunteering as a guest speaker. 

Kenny said around 90 per cent of the content covered in his own university degree was irrelevant to his graduate role and the Griffith University collaboration was an attempt to bridge that gap. 

“We’ve hired a lot of Griffith graduates and we tend to find that a lot of internal hiring comes through our association with universities,” he said. 

“The difference between when I was studying and now …  is we’re incorporating these programs into the degrees, so you are actually making contacts, you are getting some skills and you’re leaving university being much more employable.”

Lifting the game

Another area that set Kenny apart was his commitment to helping clients regain losses through a professional claims management system, instituted officially by Tupicoffs a year ago.

The Financial Rescue program was unofficially launched after the Global Financial Crisis to help clients who had fallen victim to rogue advice, Kenny said. 

“It came about through a few clients who had had really poor advice from rogue advisers and had lost a lot of money, and their experience trying to manage those claims through the financial ombudsman service.”

He said a lot of clients came forward with the knowledge their advice was negligent, but did not know how exactly. 

“We just found that there was this really big need, particularly because the idea of going through litigation was not realistic for a lot of our clients.”

When asked how other planners had responded to the service, Kenny said fellow planners were not threatened by it. 

“There’s always a very small number of people who bring the reputation down. We’ve had quite a number of financial planners refer clients to us and the response has been really positive,” he said. 

“You only need one person who might have affected a couple of hundred clients – and it just sends ripples through the entire community. That brings down the reputation of the entire profession. For the 99.9 per cent of advisers who are doing the right thing, this is a positive.”