Maintaining the abilities and knowledge necessary to provide a professional service has been voted as the greatest ethical challenge for Financial Planners.

The results come from the latest monthly survey conducted by Financial Planet, a site developed by the Financial Planning Standards Board to bring together Financial Planners around the world.

Second place was placing the client’s interest first and third was disclosing and managing conflicts of interest.

Other ethical challenges included providing a service with integrity and providing an objective service.

Ethics are a key issue within the Financial Planning community and the Financial Services Authority expects that firms are able to demonstrate strong ethical behaviour as a core part of their overall competence and professionalism.

The Institute of Financial Planning has been working with its members to improve ethics in the industry and has its own code of ethics and professional standards.

Adhering to this code is one of the requirements if firms want to be recognised as an Accredited Financial Planning Firm.

An ethics and practice standards day will be held on 26 April in the Midlands to cover this area in greater depth.

The session, titled ‘The Only Way is Ethics’, is the second event of this kind the IFP has run, last year’s event was rated as 8/10 by 74 per cent of delegates.

Ethical topics within CPD include ethical theory, ethical practices such as ethical dilemmas, treating customers fairly and theoretical knowledge of ethical frameworks.

Visit www.financialplanning.org.uk/ethics-practice-standards-day for more information on the ethics and practice standards day.