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UnCANNed – Nick’s Pick of the News

UnCANNed is a regular but light-hearted feature brought to you from Nick Cann, CEO, at the IFP. Well known for his forthright views and straight talking, UnCANNed is Nick’s new weekly update bringing you his thoughts on a topical Financial Planning issue in true Nick Cann style.

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Blog #69 - Procedured to Death - 11/06/2010

Ever since I have been at the IFP, I have learned and understood the huge value in processes and procedures. I have found myself emphasising this important aspect of a good Financial Planning business in hundreds of articles and presentations that I have made over the years. This year it has been the IFP’s turn to ensure that all our procedures are not only sound but properly set out. Our primary stakeholder is the Financial Planning Standard Board (FPSB). We have an affiliation agreement with them that ensures that we are the only organisation in the UK able to administer and promote the CFP^CM certification programme. As such we have a thorough audit every three years and the most recent visit took place this week.

I am pleased to say that we did very well and had two extremely competent as well as helpful auditors from the FPSB to review our whole world. The IFP is definitely in good shape but I sympathise with people going through the process of getting all their procedures into a good order and actually written down so that they can improve the efficiency and performance of the business. This audit has taken a considerable amount of staff, management and volunteer time and commitment. The output proves that this has been worth it and my thanks to all concerned for the effort given. The next challenge is to ensure that everything complies with Ofqual assuming that they are still around after the quangos have been obliterated by the new government.

IFP members should take great confidence in how the organisation is serving them as the RDR deadlines approach. I hope that as many  members as possible are able to respond to our annual membership survey which was sent out in the week and continue to feedback their constructive thoughts and ideas to us.

The next stage in our strategic plans is the official launch of the Certificate in Paraplanning, the UK’s first dedicated Paraplanner qualification. This is scheduled for the 30 June as part of our Financial Planning in Practice conference, being held in the Midlands. I am really excited about this development as a defining moment in the development of the Financial Planning profession. Our thanks to Bluefin for helping us with the pilot of this process and to Scottish Widows for ongoing support too.

I was interested by a comment in one of the blogs this week that suggested that the IFP was getting very close to Bluefin. Yes we are getting very close to them as well as a number of other companies large and small that are committing to the development of Financial Planners and Financial Planning businesses. That is the point of the IFP! Consumers will ultimately be better served if more are able to properly apply the six stage process in serving their clients’ Financial Planning needs.

The world cup of course is upon us having just gone through a couple of weeks of Britain’s Got Talent and the Young Apprentice! Financial Services needs to learn from these programmes and therefore do more to engage with the public in a way that interests them. Plenty of good ideas on this which I look forward to developing over the next few months.

One of the signals that the world cup is upon us is that there are hundreds of vehicles driving around with England flags on them.  For some reason there are no Welsh or Scottish flags. Somebody thought that this was the mayor driving around in an unlikely looking car until they saw a number of them. Most also start with two so that it doesn’t matter so much when one flies off and hits the car behind. There was also a story which I picked up on this week which explains this phenomenon a little better:

“A Professor has found after extensive research that there are two sizes of penis amongst UK men. There are those that fall within the normal range and those which are less than two inches when erect. The professor has appealed for help to continue with his research. Could all men in the UK with extremely small penises make themselves known over the next six weeks by flying a white flag with a red cross from their cars.”

For about 1.5 years, my youngest daughter Bec has been going onto me about trying “frogs’ legs” for some bizarre reason best known to her. Whilst at the excellent Hotel De Vin for the third time this week, I noted that they actually had some on the menu. Because she has worked so hard for her Common Entrance exams I have decided to surprise her by taking her along for lunch today. Hope that she likes them!

PIMS to look forward to next week and so next week’s blog will be coming from the Ocean Wave so to speak. Let’s hope that the weather is good and that there are lots of interesting and fun people there this year. We live in hope that the other events there will be interesting and fun and want to talk about something other than RDR for three days!

Have a good weekend everybody and watch out for those England flags!

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