Mortgage advising would be better as a profession

While level five of the New Zealand Certificate in Financial Services is a good step in the right direction, but it would better if mortgage advising became a profession, says mortgage adviser and chartered accountant David Green of Advice HQ.

He is pushing the idea for mortgage advisers to eventually be degree qualified and do some sort of post graduate study. “If mortgage advising is to be called a profession we need to go down that track.”

Wellington-based financial planner and mortgage adviser Craig Pope of Craig Pope Financial agrees but says advisers need to upskill themselves.

He has been working through the investment strand paper to add KiwiSaver to the list of services his business offers. He says it is, however, easier said than done. “Running a mortgage business and trying to find the time to finish the investments strand is difficult,” Pope says.

“I take my hat off to advisers that manage to combine insurance and mortgages work because they are both quite complex.

“To be honest, I think advisers are better off being really good at what they do, be it mortgages for first time buyers or investors and have really good mechanisms and referral partners that can help clients with insurance or KiwiSaver,” he says.

However, a number of advisers have pushed back on this idea. In comments on tmmonline.nz readers

“Some mortgage advisers operating in the industry now have over 20 years’ experience and that level of expertise simply can’t be taught via a degree,” one says.

Another was highly critical of the Level Five papers he had to sit: “Having over 35 year’s experience in the industry myself, I felt degraded and worthless having to complete the mortgage strand of the new academic requirement.”

“Not only was it far from adequate (not fit for purpose), the case studies were unworkable.” He alleged that the course was based on the Australian banking and adviser system, and was in no way relevant here.

“That to us has worked in our favour,” he says.

“The average mortgage broker these days is much more qualified than the average banker. We hold our people to a standard that I believe is pretty high.” ✚