Simon Rule, a mortgage broker at Rule Financial, has accused education providers and industry groups of spreading misinformation about CPD requirements for their own financial benefit.

Rule said RFAs are being told by various groups that they need to do CPD, a claim he said is unsupported by legislation, which only refers to authorised financial advisers (AFAs) having this requirement.

“CPD has become a scaremongering thing; people like the PAA, TNP and the training organisations are using it for their own purposes.  It’s all about money,” he said.

Rule said RFAs can prove their professional competence and continued up-skilling in a number of ways that don’t require them to attend CPD courses.

He said education providers were trying to recover from the number of AFAs being much lower than they’d planned for; he predicted RFAs would desert these courses once they realised they didn’t have to do them.

“To be told I’ve got to do a CPD course when it’s not mandated annoys me.  When people get told something that’s not true I’m very hard on that.”

PAA professional development manager Jenny Campbell said the complaint of scaremongering about CPD was not a new one.

“If I’ve heard that once I’ve heard it 20 million times,” she said.  “I can see why that attitude remains for some advisers because it clearly states in legislation that AFAs have to do CPD but it’s less clear about RFAs.”  

Campbell said advisers had been given the opportunity to manage their own CPD needs and warned what could happen if they didn’t take their responsibilities seriously.

“The regulator has signalled they want us to self-police and we’ve seen what happens if an industry fails to do that,” she said.

“A good example would be real estate agents; it’s all mandated out of Wellington and everyone has to do the same CPD regardless of their situation.  It’s one size fits all.  In an industry like ours, to have to all do the same CPD would be dreadful.”