Programme fosters new advice talent

Those lamenting the lack of new financial advisers may just not be looking in the right place, say the developers of a new programme developing new entrants to the industry.

Thursday, March 12th 2015, 6:00AM

by Susan Edmunds

Plan4It is new development programme for financial advisers, which starts with a two-month intensive learning course. It is then followed by 22 months of supervision.

The course was developed by a group of Newpark managing agencies who wanted to develop new talent.

Newpark managing director Darren Gannon said an opportunity had been identified to get industry players talking about the problem of recruitment.

Each recruit spends three days a week in the Newpark office having training for the first two months, with two days in the field with a managing agent.

There were 13 advisers on the course that started in January and another 19 are set to start the next course on Monday.

“There’s a lot of talk in the industry about no new people coming in but we are seeing them and it’s great, we’re after young motivated people,” Gannon said. “We recognise there are a lot of senior advisers who might exit the industry over the next few years so we are trying to bring people in who can take over the business and keep the momentum going.”

Advisers on the course are destined for KiwiSaver, risk and home loan advice.

Gannon said recruits had been found through referrals, word of mouth and advertising in local papers.

“It’s a really good industry to be involved in but we’re so poor at promoting it. There’s so much emphasis on the scary side, the regulation, we forget how good an industry it is. We’re concentrating on bringing life to the party with brand new people.”

Training and development manager Sasha Grujic said the course had a compliance focus but also looked at the conversations advisers needed to have with clients, including the six-step financial advice process.

“The focus is how to have the conversation from the beginning right to the end with the client, taking the client’s social style into account. Within the first two months they have to go out every week with senior advisers while the senior adviser conducts an interview. They learn different approaches. In the beginning it seems like they go to different interviews and totally different things are said but then they realise the same thing is said time and time again, just in different ways depending on the client. When they realise that, we know the penny has dropped.”

Managing agencies involved include Riverstone Financial Services, Assetwise, Breathe and MBS.

Grujic said he gave new recruits a long-term view but it was up to them to make a success of the opportunity. “There’s no benefit to the client of someone being there for a short time.”

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