Former Personal Finance Society President Caroline Stuart has teamed up with communication professional Melissa Kidd to launch a new learning and development service focusing on people skills.

Aimed at financial services professionals, the Co-Laboratory will offer a range of training sessions starting with virtual training sessions.

The emphasis will be on helping professionals develop their day to day communication and people skills. 

In person events are also being developed to add to online training.

The pair started the Co-Laboratory to develop the human side of finance, they said, having noticed that the profession has tended to focus on technical exams to the detriment of people skills.

Ms Kidd is a communications professional with over 20 years experience in financial services and a background in psychology. She is the director of Bristol-based communications consultancy Motem.

Ms Stuart has been working in Paraplanning for 20 years and is the founder of outsourced Paraplanning and consultancy business Sparrow Paraplanning.

She left the Personal Finance Society in January after being elected PFS President in September and was the first Paraplanner to become President of the professional body. She exited the PFS because of her concerns about the impact on her time and health of a long-running row between the CII and the PFS board.

Ms Stuart said that the FCA's new Consumer Duty requirements arriving in July will require Financial Planners to improve their client communications.

She said: “The Consumer Duty will require us all to make sure that clients understand our communications, especially those relating to advice and recommendations. This means it’s crucial our reports are as clear, simple, and as client-friendly as possible.

“We’ve noticed that there seems to be a perception compliance gets in the way of writing client-friendly reports. I don’t believe that though, as no compliance person I’ve ever spoken to has asked me to make my reports longer and more complicated!”

The Co-Laboratory will offer a combination of free shorter sessions and longer paid training sessions.