New player says its gaining ground

CPD provider Kaplan entered the New Zealand market recently and says it is making good inroads into the market.

Tuesday, February 14th 2023, 6:23PM

It says meeting continuing professional development (CPD) obligations under The Code of Professional Conduct for Financial Advice Services – Standard 9 has now become a key focus for both financial advisers and financial advice providers (FAPs).

Long established as the leading financial services CPD provider in Australia for over 30 years, Kaplan Professional has designed a complete and purpose-built continuing education offering for New Zealand, with Massey University, which it says is quickly gaining traction.

“In Australia, we have nearly 45,000 subscribers across over 2,500 corporate organisations on our Ontrack platform,” said Kaplan Professional chief executive Brian Knight.

“We had more than 400,000 completions of digital modules across our financial adviser and mortgage broking and credit content libraries in 2022, which is an increase of almost 15% on the previous year – we think this type of take-up will follow in New Zealand.”

Kaplan Professional strongly believes its continuing education solution offers value for FAPs as the best offering in the market.

“Ontrack’s reporting and tracking tools provide FAPs with the technology to comprehensively create, record and track the professional development activities and learnings of their advisers, and automatically maintain precise logs of what CPD has been completed and when,” Knight said.

“FAPs can set multiple learning plans based on an adviser’s 12-month professional development plan to pinpoint any desired competencies or knowledge gaps, while tracking each adviser’s progress at both an individual and group level.

“We also have the capability to support FAPs to build a robust CPD policy as part of their annual business plan that safeguards the practices and strategies they have in place to ensure compliance with the Financial Markets Authority.”

Kaplan Professional general manager, continuing education Jennifer Hornsey says new content is released twice a month to ensure there is always a range of current and timely content available for subscribers.

“Our continued focus for 2023 is to produce insightful, topical and wide-ranging CPD content that interests advisers, improves their knowledge, and enhances professionalism across the board.

“We will be expanding on our range of specialist short courses in areas such as cybersecurity and anti-money laundering and countering financing of terrorism, while also exploring ways advisers can be recognised and rewarded for the CPD they complete through digital badges and micro-credentials,” she said.

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