Kim Binks, consultant director, The Art of Finance, outlines the history and ethos of the company and the learning opportunities it offers in paraplanning, compliance and administration.
As an industry I think we’ve been pretty lucky over the past 12 months. Sure there’s been some ups and downs along the way, but on the whole we find ourselves and our clients here at The Verve Group busier than ever. I always find that our clients are a victim of their own success. There you are trying to grow your business, and all of a sudden there’s too many clients and not enough hours in the day to service them all, and not enough capacity in your team. We all know the general consensus that we need more advisers in the industry, but what about paraplanners, compliance and financial administrators? Same problem, and boy do we know how hard they are to find!
So, what solutions can we offer? Well, training and upskilling your team is one option to help employers create more capacity, and give employees a new challenge and career progression. Of course it’s not an overnight solution, but who has a one day business plan?!
For those of you that don’t know, The Art of Finance is part of The Verve Group, and it all started nearly 13 years ago when our CEO, Cathi Harrison started Para-Sols an outsourced paraplanning business. After a few years of gradual growth, we almost couldn’t grow fast enough, so turned to creating our own graduate scheme to bring in financial services newbies, but train them from scratch to help create that much needed capacity and help to grow not just Para-Sols, but the industry as a whole. We put our trainees on a 2 year programme to get them Diploma qualified and take them from finance newbies to fully fledged paraplanners.
It’s something that we’ve then repeated in other areas of The Verve Group, and has helped us grow to where we are today. Which is where the idea for The Art of Finance and the framework of the training programs came from, to help others in the industry train their teams and help move businesses to the next level.
Our supported courses currently cover three main job roles; Paraplanning, Compliance and Financial Admin.
The aim of these courses is to teach the necessary practical skills needed to do the job, and for those who don’t already have any qualifications, exam books or support, to get to either a Level 4 Diploma, or Level 3 in Financial Admin.
Students start on a cohort together, allowing them to share their own ways of doing things, and learn from each other whilst also being supported by our tutors every step of the way. It’s not just about learning content, we help you implement the learning into the day job in a common sense and compliant way and we share our own methods of being efficient along the way!
All the learning is delivered remotely with a variety of exam revision sessions and practical skills roundtables and one to ones. Students are also provided with an engaging e-learning system, access to the online student community groups and books and materials needed to pass exams.
You can find out a little more about the courses on the links below, or if you want to chat about how they can benefit you or your team book in some time to talk.
