AMP licensee ipac Financial Advice is seeing the benefits of using behavioural finance principles, effective methodologies and e-learning to strengthen its advisers' skills.
"We've been rolling out our Life Choices program," ipac Financial Advice national manager of advice development John Dani told InvestorDaily.
"It's about refreshing, modernising and adapting our current advice process to what we have identified as being fairly significant changes in the needs and expectations of our clients, particularly over the last three to five years."
One of the key components of its program surrounds client engagement skills, which was rolled out in September last year.
"It's all about, how do we equip our advisers, in regards to interpersonal skills, to be able to engender trust and connect with their clients?" Dani said.
"It's been enthusiastically embraced by our advisers because the training we've made available to them has been based on behavioural finance principles and emotional intelligence. [They] are highly role and simulation-based."
The client engagement training is also assisting in advisers' self-awareness, as they understand how exactly they interact with clients, he said, adding that ipac has invested "an awful lot" in this aspect of its adviser training.
Given the post-global financial crisis environment and uncertainty, ipac is focused on developing methods for advisers to confidently break bad news.
"The medical profession have built into their curriculum how to break bad news but there's nothing in the financial planning industry to equip advisers with that," Dani said.
"So we've adapted the methodology of oncologists for our advisers' interpersonal skills training."
Ipac is also making more use of e-learning to deliver training on a self-paced basis.
The dealer group currently has about 50 advisers but are not looking to undertake an aggressive recruitment campaign, Dani said.
Since AMP completed its merger with Axa Asia Pacific's Australian and New Zealand business, it has been business as usual as no major changes were implemented, he said.
"A lot of the things we are doing or have done, AMP are really interested in terms of how it could be applied to their broader advice framework."
