“Trust needs to be built in the financial advice industry, and bringing in people from different backgrounds is the way to go about it”. All very well, but the aim of our regulator has been to change financial advising from an ‘industry’ to a profession, and so encourage full-term career advisers to choose to train at 20-something, as do most accountants and solicitors. Thirty years ago, it was a second career, and virtually all of those now-50-something advisers have been engineers or soldiers, builders or miners, to name but a few. Back then the entry-level training was two weeks in the classroom, two weeks on the road, and off you went as a self-employed life insurance salesman. Not many made it past the first couple of months but most who did are still advising. And not many these days, can or will take a couple of years’ worth of exams to head into an uncertain future. Can’t have it both ways, guys.
“Letter of authority: Why now is the right time for change”
This may sound like a non-issue from outside the world-of-financial-advice bubble. It is the bain, however, of the daily working lives of many of us, particularly of those paid by we advisers to do the dirty work of dealing with the many providers with whom we have to work.
