Alex Lannin, technical services manager at Francis Clark Financial Planning, has a been promoted into a multifunctional managerial role but he started at the firm as a trainee paraplanner, he tells rob Kingsbury
When Professional Paraplanner talked to Alex Lannin, technical services manager at Francis Clark Financial Planning, he was in the firm’s Torquay office, one of three offices out of seven where the south-west based accountancy and chartered financial planning firm has based its paraplanners. Alex primarily works out of the Exeter office, overseeing a six-strong team of paraplanners that serves 16 financial consultants spread around the region.
A graduate from Oxford Brookes University Alex says that, like many people, he “fell into financial services”. He knew when he came out of university with a degree in Town and Country Planning that although he’d found it “an interesting subject” it was not an area in which he wanted to pursue his career. His hometown of Ivybridge, Devon had limited job prospects so he moved with some friends to Bristol. Here he ended up in financial services, working for AXA UK for five years, first in customer services and then in technical support. When Alex’s wife was expecting their first child, in 2007, they relocated to Plymouth to be near family and Alex applied for and got the role of trainee paraplanner at Francis Clark, although, again like many, “paraplanning was not something I had heard of before then,” he admits
When he joined the company there were seven staff in the financial planning department working out of the Newton Abbott office. Alex was one of two paraplanners; the other incumbent at the time is now an adviser for the firm.
Alex quickly moved from trainee to a fully-fledged paraplanner, taking his exams along the way. “Although I had taken FP 1 and FP 2, I had to start pretty much from scratch, taking the necessary exams to gain the certificate and then the diploma in financial planning in 2012,” he says. He is currently working towards the advanced diploma and will then go on to seek chartered financial planner status. “Chartered is what our financial planners aspire to and I think myself and my team should also be at that level if we are to serve them properly,” Alex says.
