Investing in the Future of our Profession

The Big Announcement

I announced earlier this year that FP Advance had agreed to provide £10,000 a year to Coventry University to fully fund one scholarship place in their Global Financial Planning programme.

But since then other industry leaders have decided to get on board and we’ve now got much bigger plans. They include:

• Abraham Okusanya at Timeline, who decided to match the FP Advance £10,000 annual commitment. (Did you know he’s a Coventry Uni alumnus?)
• Barry Horner at Paradigm Norton
• Amyr Rocha Lima from Strategic Wealth Partners
• Adam Owen
• The CISI has agreed to provide school students with access to their Level 2 Award in Fundamentals of Financial Services
• Stephen Jones from Cooper Parry Wealth will pay for the costs of student visits to his firm and provide staff to mentor students

Our ambition is to create the Harvard Business School of Financial Planning in the UK

Our goal is to dramatically ramp up the flow of emerging talent entering the financial planning profession in the future.

Coventry Uni has campuses in the Midlands, Scarborough and London, giving them great coverage for students and businesses across large parts of the UK.

Led by the amazing Dr Lien Luu (Head of Finance degrees), Professor Jenna Ward (Dean of the College of Business and Law), and Dr Uchenna Tony-Okeke (Head of Recruitment and Marketing in the School of Economics, Finance and Accounting), our long-term plan is multi-faceted:

• Did you know that very few students in secondary schools and university have even heard of Financial Planning as a career option?
• Why? Because their influencers (parents and career guidance counsellors) don’t know about or understand our profession and career path.

So the first strand of our approach is to influence the influencers. Coventry Uni have created and launched a competition aimed at secondary schools where students submit a project that helps them learn about financial planning as a career option.

We’ll also be looking for Financial Planning professionals to do some presentations in schools in the UK or to participate in free financial planning days at the Money Clinic (supported by the Money and Pensions Service) at Coventry Uni (say one a year). If you’re up for that and can get to the Midlands when required, then please register your interest (see link below).

What’s In It For You?

Our long-term goal is to positively impact the profession by creating a larger talent pool. As you know, it’s tough out there finding talent with the requisite experience.

• If you’ve had a great career and sold your business, this could be a chance to “pass it on”.
• And if you have next-generation leadership now running your business or coming through to do so in the future, you will be giving a gift that keeps on giving.

If you run a beautifully formed financial planning business, you know how far we’ve come in the last 30 years.

• From sales to advice
• From conflicted to fiduciary
• From opaque to transparent
• From commission to fees
• From male, pale and stale to (more) diverse (Ok, there’s still work to be done here).

But the biggest change of all?

From industry to emerging profession

This Can’t Be It

At a conference I ran earlier this year for my UYBP community, David Ferguson, CEO at seccl, said publicly, “What you’ve achieved is amazing, but surely this can’t be it.”

His point?

All the work we’ve done to transform the way advice is given and the way firms are managed and operated needs to kick on from here. We’ve just laid the foundations. We have the momentum to take the profession to the next level; we mustn’t let it end here.

I couldn’t agree more.

Now what are we going to do about it?

Are you in? And can you help?

Click below to let us know how you can help us in our mission.

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