Systemising your approach to competence

The Training & Competence landscape has developed significantly since the RDR as supervisory authorities in the UK look to drive better outcomes for retail customers. 

Through the Senior Management Arrangements Systems Sourcebook (SYSC) and the Training and Competence Sourcebook (TC) the regulators have created a regime to ensure that financial services employees are appropriately qualified, competent and supervised. It is though up to firms themselves to decide which methods to use when assessing competence, meaning a broad range of approaches have developed across different companies and can even differ from team to team.

From onboarding new recruits through to ensuring supervisors have the appropriate skills and qualifications, independent financial advisors have already established a range of Training & Competence pathways to meet these requirements. Increasingly though, there is a requirement for these individual practices to come together in a top-down framework that can be applied across the firm. The impact of the Senior Managers & Certification Regime (SM&CR) is that a Senior Manager now holds the prescribed responsibility for a firm’s performance of its obligations under the Certification Regime and that includes ensuring that staff involved in the advice process are fit and proper. Clearly, the appropriate execution of this obligation requires transparency to be delivered through standardisation and ideally systemisation across the firm.

At Trailight we help our customers to deliver the benefits of systemising their T&C schemes with our People Risk Management (PRM) solution. PRM helps to manage all elements of staff performance and provides a centralised solution for managing competence and people risk. It provides the flexibility to re-create your firms’ competence and capability schemes and frameworks in a systemised fashion and measure staff against these frameworks. This includes creating and defining key performance indicators, setting supervision policy, driving and recording 1-2-1 conversations, recording professional training and ongoing development including CPD, and providing a full audit history of all actions taken.

PRM provides a range of reports and dashboards that allows you to drill into individual actions or aggregated views of performance across the organisation ensuring you have an early warning system to identify people risk and can ingest many different sources of performance data and then automate your important lifecycle events, including authorisations, qualifications, and permissions, and set required levels of activity and required responses to risks.