President's welcome

President’s Welcome

I am delighted to welcome you to the Personal Finance Society (PFS), the foremost professional body for financial planners and those that support the profession.

Our organisation is dedicated to helping you develop and maintain your professional qualifications and standards. We do this by providing access to quality learning materials, workshops and support services.

As our growing membership highlights, there has never been a more important time to become a member. The RDR has presented us all with a huge challenge, but I am delighted to say that record numbers of members are already at the Diploma Level required by the FSA. Additionally, many have also gone on to take higher level qualifications as evidenced by an ever growing number of Chartered Financial Planners.

As demand has increased, we have added more opportunities to take qualifications by extending the number of exam centres available as well as working hard to manage the huge demand for our qualification ‘gap fill’ workshops.

As I write this letter, we have already  provided almost 100 member events this year, including regional and one day conferences, events for Chartered members and of course gap fill sessions.  By the end of 2011, this figure will have reached around 270, including our flagship event, a two day Annual Conference and Chartered Awards celebration – one not to miss!

With all the pressures and demand on your time, we recognise it is not always easy to attend events, so we have videoed many of the gap fill sessions and RDR linked conferences and posted them to the website for your convenience. Going forward we intend to do more of this as the demand for sessions inevitably grows in the lead up to 2013.

However, I would urge you all to get involved in these events as the benefits are not solely based around the content delivered. Many of you tell me that simply meeting your peers and sharing ideas and best practice is of equal value!

Being part of the Chartered Insurance Institute Group (CII) enables  you to access a suite of valuable benefits. As an FSA Accredited Body, the CII will be providing  Statements of Professional Standing (SPSs) to those members who require them, at no extra charge to your membership. Likewise, our gap fill tool,  provided by the CII, is proving invaluable to members who need to identify their personal ‘top up’ subjects.

As I am sure you have noticed, our world has changed dramatically in the last 3 years. Ethics and Standards now play a far more prominent role in our day to day lives than ever before, especially within the Financial Services arena. Today, our clients expect us to be competent - going forward they will demand it, and seek out those that are so.  By developing ourselves through qualifications and training, both academic and vocational, we will help secure ourselves and our profession long into the future. 

Finally, as a large organisation it is important that we keep in touch with our membership. Whilst we run regular surveys and publish a bi-monthly magazine, we would also like you to join our LinkedIn group – ‘PFS President’s Thinktank’, which has over a 1000 members who debate and discuss topical issues about  the things that affect you and your business on a daily basis. It also provides us with useful insight into your thinking and concerns and helps us to identify areas on which we need to focus, so please contribute to the discussions.

May I wish you a successful year ahead and thank you for joining our Society.

Jon Everill
PFS President