FASEA consultation process ‘disheartening’: AFA

Speaking at the Sydney leg of the AFA Connect Tour, AFA general manager of policy and professionalism Phil Anderson said the professional body had spent a lot of time on its consultation responses.

In providing its own recommendations and highlighting issues and consequences, he noted some of the AFA’s submissions stretch over 30 pages.

“It is incredibly disheartening when you do all that work and you see such little return,” Mr Anderson said.

FASEA closed its consultation process around relevant degree standards on 14 December, receiving 92 submissions. The policy was finalised within five working days on 27 December.

Commenting on the process, Mr Anderson said FASEA made just two changes.

“I'll just give you an insight into one of changes. There's a list of relevant fields of study. You know what they added? Financial planning. For the financial advice and planning profession, they added that subject area. That was not a big change,” Mr Anderson said.

“The second change that they made, which is heading in the right direction, is recognising people who have between four and seven relevant subjects to give them two credits rather than one.”

In January, FASEA finalised its educational pathways policy, including a defined recognition of prior learning framework for existing advisers.

Under the policy, the maximum requirement for a new entrant will be an approved bachelor degree of 24 subjects and for an existing adviser will be a graduate diploma of eight subjects.

The minimum requirements for a new entrant will be an approved graduate diploma of eight subjects. For an existing adviser, it will be one subject being FASEA’s bridging course – the FASEA Code of Ethics and Code Monitoring Bodies.

Adrian Flores

Adrian Flores is a deputy editor at Momentum Media, focusing mainly on banking, wealth management and financial services. He has also written for Public Accountant, Accountants Daily and The CEO Magazine.

You can contact him on [email protected].