Australia’s Financial Adviser Standards and Ethics Authority (Fasea) outlined its plans for the incoming “professional year” requirements for financial planners on 23 July.
Professional year
The professional year concept is already common in several professions; including law, accounting and medicine.
Fasea said it is now planning to introduce a professional year for financial advisers who enter the industry on or after 1 January 2019.
The standards authority said the professional year would encompass practical learning of four core technical competencies that the inexperienced advisers learned during their degree studies.
They are:
- technical competence,
- client care and practice,
- regulatory compliance and consumer protection,
- professionalism and ethics.
‘Provisional financial adviser’
New advisers would undertake the professional year requirements in their first continuous 12 months of full-time employment.
During this period, Fasea said the advisers will be known as “provisional financial advisers”.
Further, Fasea is proposing that, if an adviser takes a career break for more than two years, they would be required to undertake professional development training to ensure they are equipped with the latest regulatory and licensee requirements.
Lastly, Fasea proposes that each advice business has a “supervisor” who will take responsibility for the training of any provisional financial advisers it employs.
Under-fire Australia advise firm AMP announced on 20 July it launched a training and development programme for its employees to “meet the growing demand for high-quality financial advisers”.
