“One of our top advisers retired about two years ago and it took us eight months to find a replacement. It is getting tougher and tougher to find good quality advisers,” he says.
Grow your own
As a result of this dilemma, firms struggling to recruit advisers have decided to take qualification matters into their own hands. Adviser academies are not revolutionary, but have run under the radar in recent years. St. James’s Place has run an advice academy for some time, but Sesame Bankhall sold its Financial Adviser School business at the start of last year. The school was purchased by Intrinsic, the advice arm of Old Mutual Wealth, and this commitment has been followed in 2017 by more firms taking the plunge to attract a new breed of advisers.
Both IFA Ascot Lloyd and restricted advice firm NFU Mutual launched academies of their own in the opening months of the year, keen to attract a younger cohort of advisers. Ascot Lloyd’s programme closed for applications back in February and Mr Balgarnie describes the response as “overwhelming”, having received nearly 100 CVs.
The trainee regime has been carefully constructed. From inception to becoming a fully-fledged adviser should take three to four years. Mr Balgarnie explains that the first two years will focus on administration and paraplanning, with students then eased into the application of advice. He says: “Assuming they’ve come through the first two stages and passed all of the requirements, they will then become a trainee adviser and move to Ascot Lloyd Direct – a telephone based-service offering to clients who have smaller portfolios. At that point they will hone their interpersonal, influencing, negotiation skills.”
NFU Mutual’s academy will follow a similar structure, with six trainees initially focusing on simple protection products after completion of the diploma and initial training.
Interestingly, a core approach of each programme is to allocate an experienced adviser to each trainee as a mentor.
“We want to match them with the right buddy,” says Mr King. “A lot of their time will be spent with quality advisers watching how they do it.”
Running an academy does have its risks as well as its benefits. Firms would expect trainees to remain with them for some time in order to recoup the sizeable sums invested in their qualifications. But the reality is often very different from this ideal world. What if the advisers leave shortly after successfully completely the programme?
Mr King explains that NFU Mutual hasimplemented a sliding scale refund agreement – for hard costs such as courses and workshops – should the individual leave before a certain point. “We are making a massive commitment here. We’re not taking any of these trainees on without having a plan in place of where they will go at the end of it and we’re just asking for the same commitment back, which I think is very fair.”
