qualifications

The managing director of an advisory firm has hit back at shadow pensions minister Nigel Waterson for questioning the RDR's focus on qualifications above experience.

Fears current professional qualifications will become redundant post-2012 and uncertainty about new qualifications remain widespread, according a debate chaired by The Personal Finance Society (PFS) today.

"A stricter examination regime will weed out the people that shouldn't be in this business."

The Financial Advice Academy (FAA) has questioned the FSA's 2012 timetable for new qualifications standards.

Experienced investment advisers in practice at 30 June 2009 will be allowed to take oral versions of the written exams needed to get them up to post-RDR standards, but this option will be withdrawn at the end of 2012.

Sesame is urging the FSA to conduct a full cost benefit analysis of the RDR, amid fears many adviser businesses will become unprofitable due to the regulatory burden.

Advisers will have to wait until the middle of next year before knowing for sure how to attain the qualifications required to continue practising beyond 2012, the FSA says today.

In the first of a series John Woodford offers a guide to the elements going into the pricing of protection products.

The FSA has not ruled out the role of 'grandfathering' in the transition to higher industry qualifications, despite its apparent dismissal by the regulator's professionalism working group in the RDR Feedback Report.

AIFA policy director Andrew Strange has called on the FSA to provide a "sensible" transition period of at least five years for advisers to gain post-RDR qualifications.