Despite deciding that advice wasn’t for her, Davenport believes that using paraplanning as a route into an adviser role is a good path for new entrants to take.
Last year, research from Quilter showed that female paraplanners are much less likely to become advisers than their male counterparts, despite most having, or in the process of getting, adviser qualifications.
Just 6 per cent of female advisers said they would like to go on to become a financial adviser. This compared to 41 per cent of men.
“That is something I see across the board, but I’m not sure that it’s representative of paraplanners. I think it is representative of the adviser population, which is predominantly male,” Davenport said.
“I’m not sure I can say this approaching 60, but you go to seminars and it is still predominantly old men.
“My experience among the Kingswood midland region is there is a mix of male and female paraplanners and I’ve got two coming up the admin team that want to come into paraplanning as a springboard into advising and I think that is a very, very good way [to do it]. Certainly some of our better advisers have done that.
“Apart from anything else, it gives them the knowledge and experience. You can read a book but there's nothing like doing it and I think if people have done the admin job they’ve got more empathy with what is actually involved and required.
“If they’ve done the paraplanning job they know what they expect an adviser to give them so hopefully they remember all of that and give us all of that information in the first place,” Davenport said.
In her opinion, the top qualities that are needed for a paraplanner to succeed in the profession are “attention to detail, good time-management, and just a desire to keep learning basically.”
“I don’t expect anybody, adviser or paraplanner to know all of the answers, what I do expect both paraplanners and advisers to know is there is a question. That you then go ‘hang on, that rings a bell, I need to check that out’.
She added: “Because the risk of bad advice isn’t from the people that don’t know the answer, it’s the people who don’t know there’s a question.”
jane.matthews@ft.com
