Punter Southall Group, one of the UK's largest corporate pension and investment consultants, has extended the use of the Insight platform (Insight) from Redland Business Solutions to provide support for the planning, sourcing and recording of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for its Private Client, Self-invested Personal Pension (SIPP) and Corporate DC pension consultants.
This additional capability will allow Punter Southall to provide tailored CPD templates to its consultant community, set up centrally approved CPD Plans and provide access to a wide variety of CPD solutions. It also includes an 'eMarketplace' that will allow consultants to browse and find activities that are relevant to their role and development needs, all within a Punter Southall branded environment.
The new CPD Portal also uses the existing MoneyMarketing CPD Centre material including access to all of the specialist Taxbriefs CPD solutions, which are available free to Punter Southall's consultants.
Punter Southall can also now incorporate both their own in-house CPD material and their existing Insight based competency tests which will provide a single centralised CPD and testing solution.
A key benefit of the Insight CPD Portal for senior management is how they can monitor the progress of their consultants. For instance the extensive CPD and SPS Management capability and a set of powerful interactive MI dashboards will allow them to review performance against expected CPD targets, monitor progress of users against their CPD / SPS 'year' and keep abreast of the types and levels of CPD activity completed or planned to be undertaken by users.
Kevan Wood, Head of Compliance of Punter Southall's Private Client, SIPP and Corporate DC pension businesses said: "The culture of Punter Southall is built on the bedrock of strong relationships with our clients, other professionals and our staff. An important element of this is to provide our consultants with the very highest levels of support and resources available. As we have already successfully implemented Redland's Insight platform for Competency Testing within the business, we were very interested to review the CPD Portal capabilities that Insight can now support.
"We believe the Insight CPD Portal to be the easiest to use and most comprehensive CPD solution for Advisers in the market but it also provides us with a CPD management capability that will support the monitoring of CPD activity and enable management to examine trends and be proactive in identifying corrective action to ensure the consultants are progressing with CPD / SPS as effectively as possible.
"We feel that by coupling this capability with our existing Insight Competency Testing functionality it provides a significant benefit to the business and allows us to get an overarching view of all CPD activity and related competency levels within the consultant community."
The new online CPD portal will be launched in the first quarter and is accessible to all the Consultants, Paraplanners and Compliance staff in Punter Southall's Private Client, SIPP and Corporate DC pension businesses.
Mark Walker-Smith, Redland's Business Development Director says "The Insight CPD Portal is a 'one stop shop', allowing consultants to log a full record of their CPD in one, easy to access location. Punter Southall already utilise Redland's Insight platform for Competency Testing and with the introduction of the CPD Portal will be able to manage the interaction between Competency Testing and CPD activities from a single, central system.
"We are very pleased to be working with Punter Southall on this extended use of our Insight product. The additional services will create a real 'added value' solution for their consultants and allows Punter Southall management to get a consolidated, aggregated view of CPD and competency activity across the business."