Love for financial planning
Holman set up Cats after getting disillusioned with her in-house compliance job at a local company in Colchester.
“When I set up Cats I thought it was just gonna be me working in East Anglia and London, happy days. But luckily I’ve been working with a small bunch, a handful of firms. I then got referrals which took me out to the West Midlands and all over the place,” she says.
Adviser Phil Billingham then introduced her to the then Institute of Financial Planning and its certified financial planner community, which she was very fond of. She ended up sitting on the board of the IFP before it was merged with the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment.
In 2009, she and her husband, Martyn Holman, decided to run the business together, and with the help from some former colleagues at DBS Financial Management — the independent financial adviser network Holman once worked at — the business has grown ever since.
It looks after about 200 companies throughout the UK that are predominantly financial planning firms of below five advisers, though some of its clients have more than 10 advisers.
Holman says the issues she comes across are not too dissimilar in large and small companies, but implementation can be different.
Whereas larger companies have more layers and hoops to jump through and are therefore typically slower to implement changes, smaller firms often have fewer people to do the work, she says.
The burden on small companies shows, for instance, when big changes are on the cards such as a change of customer relationship management, which is resource intensive.
Companies large and small have been guilty of an “obvious” oversight though, which is their advisers’ obligation to do protection continuing professional development, even if they do not technically advise on protection. And the obligation is a hefty 40 per cent of overall CPD, Holman says.
She says that under the insurance distribution directive, advisers are required to do 15 hours of protection CPD included in their overall 35 hours.
“A lot of financial advisers say, ‘well, I don’t do protection, so I don’t have to do it’. That’s wrong because the distribution directive covers things like long-term care, annuities, insurance, pensions, pension contracts, trust work. So every financial planner will have to do protection CPD,” she says.
Holman says that breaching this is not a notifiable event to the FCA; however, it should be notified on the breaches log and it could affect the adviser’s competency statement.
“It would suggests under fit and proper rules, competency would include CPD,” she says. “Then it’d be for whoever is responsible for signing that certificate of competency [to decide] are they happy to sign and put their name on it and be accountable to the FCA if that person has not done their 15 hours of protection [CPD]. It’s a bit of a faff. But nonetheless, it is a requirement.”
