AMP's decision to offer a new financial services diploma is part of a broader plan to improve education standards within the industry, a company director has said.
AMP Horizons Director Tim Steele said the new six-month diploma, to be delivered in partnership with Pinnacle Financial Services Academy in January next year, is one of a number of new initiatives for the group.
"We believe that there is work that still needs to be done to ratchet up the standard and expectation of education in the industry, including the central assessment of the diploma or the RG146 requirement, ideally monitored by ASIC," Steele said.
"We think there's an opportunity in the market to deliver a higher quality diploma and to continue to raise the bar in respect to education standards so that we've got a better learning outcome."
Steele said other potential avenues for the academy are working with existing tertiary institutions as well as enhancing online education tools.
The decision to offer the diploma was driven by demand from candidates wishing to enrol in Horizons who did not meet the academy's diploma prerequisite.
"It was a strategic opportunity that we identified based on demand that was coming from prospective candidates for the program," Steele said.
"But it also forms a part of what we deliver through the academy in looking to actually formalise some of the qualifications that could be delivered as part of the value proposition for Horizons once a candidate joins us."
Steele said while Horizons has at different times offered an advance diploma as part of the academy training, at the times it didn't entirely align to where its planners needed to be at that point of their development.
"Now that we've built the professional year we think it makes sense to us to revisit how we might map a formal qualification to the components of the trainings," he said.
While AMP has a long association with Pinnacle and its managing director John Prowse, AMP did make approaches to a number of registered training organisations (RTO).
"We did approach other RTOs and ask if they had an interest and some expressed an interest and some felt it wasn't necessarily in line with what they wanted to do," Steele said.
