The whole ‘Chartered Body Alliance’ thing seems to have come out of nowhere to me. Clearly it has been brewing for a while and I think that it is a good thing for financial services.

Much debate is ongoing about the merits of being a Certified or Chartered Financial Planner, writes Keri Carter CFP^TM, managing director of Broadway Financial Planning.

I’m assuming that many of you have been in financial services/planning/advice for many years. It’s easy to get desensitised to the jargon, language and mental constructs that pervade our industry.

Paraplanning has never been so exciting. In June we had the 2017 CISI / IFP Paraplanner Conference and a couple of weeks ago we had the Report Writing HowWow from the Paraplanners PowWow movement. These two events had similar but different aims.

So the totem pole has been dismantled, the teepees taken down and all the Powwowers have moseyed on back to their ranches with the sun setting on another Paraplanners Powwow.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the word ‘intentionality’. Some things just happen, but most of the time there is something or someone influencing an outcome. We can influence by accident, or we can set out to do something deliberately.

A decade ago, I did something that seemed unlikely, if not impossible, fewer than 10 years earlier. 

I wrote early in 2017 about my hopes for the industry, and touched on unifying Financial Planning and Paraplanning communities, and how any future merger of the PFS and the CISI might give Paraplanners a voice.

In late 2015 we made the decision to rebrand our business Jane Smith Financial Planning.

There has been a lot of coverage in the financial media lately about the FCA’s plans for changes on Defined Benefit (DB) transfer advice.