theme 2 Highest Professional Standards

By the end of 2022 we had more than 800 Chartered firms – Chartered Financial Planners, Chartered Insurers, Chartered Insurance Brokers, and Chartered Insurance Underwriting Agents. Every Chartered firm makes a public declaration to deliver professional standards, and signs up to our Chartered Ethos, which requires them to meet expectations related to nurturing knowledge, client centricity and serving society. We know from our Chartered Perception Metric that 77% (in December 2022) of consumers and businesses are more likely to choose a chartered firm over a non-chartered firm when seeking professional financial or insurance advice, with clients feeling that these firms are more likely to deliver good practice and good customer outcomes. We will continue to commission the Institute of Customer Service to conduct this survey and do more to elevate awareness of the results in future.

Setting and maintaining the highest professional standards is a core activity for a professional membership body. In general, the standards that we set for our collective professions and members is higher than the minimum threshold standards set by the relevant regulators though the purpose is common – we do so to provide public trust and confidence in the profession and the sector.

Our ‘Shaping the Future Together’ consultation revealed that CII and PFS members want the Institute to champion good practice within the profession and to take firm action in cases of misconduct. UK and international members were consistent in their desire for us to uphold and promote high professional standards.

This feedback confirmed that professional standards are critically important not only to the Institute but to our members. As a result, a key ambition of this Plan is to drive professional standards ever higher. We will achieve this through a major review of the way in which the standards for our professions are set, which will be done under the leadership of the Institute’s Professional Standards Committee. The review will identify a detailed definition of professional standards and the role of professional standards in the context of the chartered status of individuals and corporate members amongst others.

We anticipate allocating a greater proportion of our resources in the future to professional standards in keeping with the expectation of our members. This will include producing and publishing a greater number of reports that consider sectoral issues and the state of our professions, including evidence of good practice and practice which does not meet our standards, alongside other thought leadership publications and activities.

We will also build a body of evidence that demonstrates to the public the value of dealing with a CII or PFS professional and deliver promotional campaigns to reinforce that message widely. Armed with this evidence, we will meet regularly with government and the regulators to discuss and promote professional standards across our sectors.

Recognising the esteem with which UK professional membership bodies are held overseas, we will also aim to become more influential on the development of professional standards for the insurance and financial planning sectors internationally, working directly with regulators in overseas jurisdictions and in collaboration with the Institute’s International Affiliated Institutes.