News and Blogs Becoming a financial adviser

Andy Agnew, Non-Advised-Sales Consultant at NFU Mutual, talks to us about deciding to become a financial adviser, what it was like sitting the Diploma for Financial Advisers (DipFA) exams, and why being kind is not just a nice to have.

Planning ahead doesn’t always get its due. In fact, most of us would probably agree that, if you want to make God laugh, you should tell Him your plans. Andy Agnew’s initial career steps might seem to support that.

Andy moved from a small farming community in Northern Ireland to do a degree in electrical engineering in Glasgow. While he was studying, he took a part-time job with NFU Mutual, the Mutual Insurance Society of the National Farmers’ Union.

“I was working in sales in general insurance, so selling car and home insurance and servicing for that, as well as the cover that we specialise in, like equine and tractor policies,” says Andy. “I just enjoyed it and decided to make a career out of it.”

Does he have any regrets about not finishing the degree in electrical engineering? “Not in the slightest,” he says. “I’ve always been fascinated by the financial side of things and good with numbers.”

Though there were many different potential career paths at NFU Mutual, Andy wanted to become a financial adviser. “I ended up working alongside financial advisers in non-advised sales and I found it was just really interesting,” he says.

NFU Mutual offered Andy the chance to sit the Diploma for Financial Advisers (DipFA), which is the minimum qualification required to become a regulated financial adviser. The firm paid the fee and also provided regular ‘personal development time’. (In exchange, staff have to contract to continue to work for NFU Mutual for two years after passing the exam.)

“I took a block of time on Wednesday afternoon and used that to study, as well as my own time,” says Andy.

Andy says that if he had to deviate from the plan in some way, say because of his personal life, he made up for it at another time, fitting in the studying whenever he had some slack. When it came to the actual learning, his first step was to look at all the mock exams to find the main gaps in his knowledge. Then he read through all the course materials and did the practice questions, and then read through things again. “That worked for me,” he says. (Andy got a very high mark in the exam.) “It won’t be the same for everybody, but I found that it worked really well because I like to read up on the details of technical knowledge. I found it stuck in my head. I did the quizzes as well.”

One of the advantages of sitting DipFA while working is that the study materials and the day-to-day job can have synergies. “There were quite a few,” says Andy. “Perhaps in terms of the regulation side of it not so much, and not so much in taxation, but I found that I already knew quite a lot about protection and about retirement planning and the course helped me in my job as I developed my knowledge.”

But even the laid best plans, carefully carried out, face challenges. What did Andy find hard? “Studying can be very isolating when you’re doing it on your own,” he says. “I’ve been lucky because I can talk directly to people who have been through the experience. I also found the forums on LIBF very good. There was some really helpful information there. It’s much easier to be disciplined when you’ve got some support from other people.”

NFU Mutual doesn’t guarantee staff who pass DipFA a role as a financial adviser, but they can apply for any suitable vacancies. As a financial adviser for NFU Mutual in Scotland, Andy would be going out to farms within a set area to give personal advice to NFU members, and he has already been shadowing experienced advisers. Over time, he wants to deal with compliance around member’ assets.

NFU Mutual doesn’t guarantee staff who pass DipFA a role as a financial adviser, but they can apply for any suitable vacancies. As a financial adviser for NFU Mutual in Scotland, Andy would be going out to farms within a set area to give personal advice to NFU members, and he has already been shadowing experienced advisers. Over time, he wants to become CASS-approved so that he can deal with compliance around members’ assets.

“The big thing in farming is the community,” says Andy. “There’s no set way to provide financial advice. There’s a lot to discuss with clients, and that has always appealed to me. My big thing is about helping people.”

Andy says that the farming community is very diverse. Some people know a lot about the financial services they need, but others may be completely focused on their farm with very little awareness of financial products.

Further, farming can appear sleepy and unchanging – until it isn’t. The recent rules on inheritance tax for farms, for example, have galvanised even those who have never really given estate planning any thought. “That’s where we come in and help them out, and that’s where the value is in making sure they’ve got the right things for themselves and their families,” says Andy.

What would Andy say is central to the role of being a good financial adviser? “Building trust. And, you know what, being kind. Going out of your way to help people is, and should be, a huge part of it.”