Dear colleagues,

In our first ten years of standard setting and certification tasks, EFPA has made giant steps towards a Europe-wide recognition of our marks. We will still be strengthening our role to provide qualifications to professionals in many countries.

Nevertheless, EFPA has also become a community of certificate holders listed in the register, undergoing continuous education and subject to compliance with our ethical code.

A community should also gradually become a network: in this case, a network of financial services’ professionals with common interests, concerns and aims.

This newsletter is designed to help in the task of increasingly becoming an important network in addition to sharing common professional recognitions.

As EFPA Chairman, I invite all of you to be active in your local/national EFPA and to contribute to this newsletter and to all future activities and instruments that EFPA will generate for our common aim: to permanently go on improving our professionalism.

My best wishes to all of you.

Josep Soler-Alberti
EFPA Chairman

The EFPA body which deals with all our academic, accreditation and certification issues is the Standard and Qualifications Committee (SQC), now chaired by Professor Emanuele Carluccio (Italy) and previously by Dr. Wolfgang Reittinger (Germany) and Ms Susan Middelboe (Denmark).

During 2013, the SQC has developed an efficient and hard work on important tasks for the present and future of our organization. The most important include:

• Reaccreditation of national programs based on the new (2012) Core Competence Framework. All exams from 1/01/2014 are going to be based on the new standard.
• Based on a draft proposed by EFPA Austria, a new EFPA Code of Ethics was approved. The new code responds better to the standards requirement of today’s financial advisor and planner.
• Start designing new rules for examinations with the aim of making the assessment process increasingly homogeneous in all countries.

Current members of the SQC are:

SQC Chairman: Emanuele Carluccio
Austria: Helmut Siegler
Belgium: Luc de Schoesitter
Denmark: Lars Krull
France: Martine Cullier
Germany: Wolfgang Reittinger
Ireland: Paul Ryan
Italy: Paola Musile Tanzi and Emanuele Carluccio
Poland: Ewa Malyszko
Spain: Alfonso Roa

EFPA certified financial advisers met for the first time in the club format to jointly define the key requirements of professional financial advice and talk about relevant market events. The new format of the meetings is intended to promote stronger integration of certified financial advisors and dissemination of knowledge about the quality of the work of EFPA certified financial advisers and benefits to their clients.

On October 9 the second Conference of EFPA Czech Republic – Trends and future of financial advice in Europe – took place in Prague. The idea of involving all stakeholders in the local market, as well as a significant presence of international guests, has fully achieved the goal and the event, organized by Marta Gellová of EFPA CR, was attended by more than 130 representatives from banks, insurance companies, brokers, training institutions and national institutions.

The QFA is the Irish certification for Financial Advisors. During 2013, the QFA Board has approved the EFPA EFA and EFPA EFP certifications for exemptions to the QFA designation.

The EFA and EFP qualifications exempt holders from four of the six modules leading to the QFA designation (Bridge programme).

Four out of six modules are granted for exemption. The two remaining modules included in the Bridge Programme are regulation and financial planning.

At the same time, EFPA Standards and Qualifications Committee (SQC) is working on the accreditation of the QFA designation with the EFA, creating a comprehensive mutual recognition process. This task is expected to be completed during the first quarter of 2014.

The end of the year means plenty of activity in EFPA countries, with many of them holding exams during November and December. EFPA certifications (EFA and EFP) are truly European standards in the sense that exams are based on the same Core Competence Framework in all affiliates.

At the moment, around 1,260 financial advisers and financial planners across Europe are studying hard to improve their skills and competences based on the same EFPA standards, wishing to become new certificate holders before the end of the year. Exams will take place in cities such as Warsaw, Frankfurt, Milan, Prague and Seville, among others.

We wish the best to all of them and hope to have them among us in the near future.

Financial markets are facing an increasing regulation, and EFPA is following closely the development of the most relevant Directives related with the financial advising and financial planning activity.

On June 2013, following the proposal of the SQC, the EFPA Board of Directors approved the new ethical standards for EPFA’s certificate holders.

These standards will be signed progressively by all EFPA’s certificate holders as they renew their certification with the necessary continuous education credits.

The commitment of EFPA’s individual registered member with our Code of Ethics is one of the most distinctive marks of our standards and certification.

Have you carefully read and re-read the new code yet?