Editor’s Comment: An unseemly family bust-up

Don’t worry I’m not going to dwell on the Royal bust-up but there are considerable parallels with the dispute between the Chartered Insurance Institute and the Personal Financial Society which has made the trade press headlines, including our own, over the past two weeks.

As far as the PFS and CII are concerned, I’m not going to deal with who is right and who is wrong here. That is beyond the remit of this column. Suffice to say that both the CII and the PFS each have an argument and that’s also precisely what they mostly have, an argument but no solution.

If there was an ACAS for professional bodies I would recommend they use it. I suspect King Charles would love to see an independent arbitrator for his warring sons too.

In the meantime, the PFS and the CII are slugging it out and very unseemly it is too. Fortunately it hasn’t made the headlines on the Daily Mail, at least not yet. Not enough violence and drug taking, I suspect.

Ultimately both sides have to get round the table and not just talk but forge a solution, if only for the sake of the Financial Planning profession which needs robust, well functioning, efficient professional bodies focused on professional development if it is to develop.

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As an aside, I’ve been a little surprised that the FCA has so far made no comment, at least publicly. The professional bodies do not just have an exam and qualification role these days. Since the Retail Distribution Review they also have a regulatory role in granting Statements of Professional Standing (SPSs). Without an SPS a planner cannot work as a regulated financial adviser.

Any failure to manage and supervise SPSs correctly could be catastrophic, if it happened.

There is no suggestion that SPSs are under any kind of threat yet but the tit for tat nature of the current conflict does no-one any favours and distracts the professional bodies from the important roles they have.

In hindsight we should have seen all this coming for several years. Since the CII made it’s cack-handed efforts to deregister the PFS several years ago and get rid of the PFS CEO role, the latter of which it managed to achieve (although the role is now restored), things have gone from bad to worse.

Equally the PFS has to recognise that its parent body is the CII. Like any parent the CII has rights and responsibilities. That needs to be accepted.

I’m not one to suggest a solution here because there is no easy solution but I do favour the approach of locking both parties in a room and only letting them out when they have agreed a compromise.

Long term I believe both bodies are better together than apart but if they cannot live together then perhaps a negotiated divorce is better than endless arguing and bickering.

Personally, I believe a future together is better than one apart but the PFS must have maximum autonomy to recognise the fact that CII and PFS members are very different animals. Two strong organisations under one umbrella group makes a lot more sense that two smaller and weaker organisations apart.

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