Pulse will operate as an online community and reflect the way many paraplanners work and will be led by national chair and paraplanning business owner Hayley Knight.
Ms Knight will be supported by a team of state chairs and said she was honoured to be the inaugural leader of Pulse and looked forward to developing the community.
“Pulse is about uniting as one community to support each other, but it is also about standing up in support of advisers and the work we all do towards the common goal of delivering great advice to everyday Australians,” she said.
AFA chief executive Philip Kewin said paraplanners were at the heart of the business and the aim of Pulse was to further empower them.
“As paraplanners are often at the very heart of an adviser’s business, our vision for Pulse is to empower them to feel more connected to their own community, share resources and learnings, and have their unique voice heard,” he said.
Membership to the community is open to AFA members who are or plan to be paraplanners and state chairs of the community include Alex Gassner for NSW, Lia Barnard for Queensland, Kerrin Glover for ACT, Kate Fellows for Victoria, Arijeet Chakrabarty for South Australia and Samantha Henry for Western Australia.
To celebrate the launch, Pulse will host its first networking event at the AFA conference in August, which will feature Michelle Hoskin, the founder of Standards International.
Honestly, do we really need this. Para-planning is NOT rocket science, its a simple admin task made easier by some very good software.
I wonder if the name “pulse” reflects the recognition that due to the new entry requirements to become an adviser the industry is on life support and we might just all be better be paraplanners? Perhaps your 20 year old pulse races when you realise you studied a Bachelor of Commerce to enter the finance and accounting world and you’ve studied the wrong degree to become a planner.
When you consider the impost on an adviser to supervise, and the education requirements to have a Bachelor of Financial Planning (studied by about 500 students) as opposed to the 500,000 students now studying a Bachelor of Commerce just to enter the industry plus the professional year program, plus an exam….(plus if you studied a Bachelor of Commerce or a Bachelor of Business you’ll need to go back & do a Graduate Diploma).that finding new entrants to the industry may cause a few pulses to race.