PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITY
Membership
We believe that membership of a professional body enables those working in financial
services to demonstrate their commitment to professionalism, acquiring further
knowledge, skills and working towards excellence. Our membership offer is crafted
from what our members tell us they want and what they value from a professional
body.
The past year saw the biggest growth in international new members of 28%, with some
regulators introducing mandatory CPD.
With the need for members to meet the mandatory CPD policy, it is of no surprise
that our CPD offering continues to be valued highly by members. We aim to support
those working in the sector to access cutting-edge information, to be able to
network with peers and to debate and discuss common issues through our local CPD
events and our online offering of CISI TV and Professional Refresher.
All members have their own online CPD record within MyCISI, where all their CISI
activities are automatically added and other CPD activity can be recorded.
Over 2,700 of our members took the time to answer our membership survey in 2018,
which gave us a wealth of insight into not only what they would like to see from us
in the next few years, but how they think they can help us shape our profession too.
Mental Well-being
Two notable outcomes from the annual survey were the overwhelming number of stories
our members shared with us about why they value their CISI membership, and the
incredibly honest and candid accounts about their experience of mental ill health in
the workplace. We asked how many of our members would be prepared to talk
to their line managers if they had stress, anxiety or depression. Alarmingly, over
50% of them said they wouldn’t. The stigma and
pressure around‘speaking up’ was evident, so we decided to initiate further research
on this topic with a follow up survey to the financial services community to gain
understanding of how various segments or individual specialisms are impacted
by this. We then worked with the BBC in December on a story around these findings,
which resulted in significant coverage in the media at the end of 2018.
We remain committed to understanding and influencing our members’ ability to ‘have a
conversation’ about mental ill health in their workplaces, so we are developing
a portal of information and guidance for financial services professionals which we
aim to launch later in 2019.
Professional Forums
We have nine Professional Forums and two Interest Groups, which are our platform
for providing members of all levels with opportunities to share content, update
their skills and network with like-minded professionals.
Each forum is run by its own committee, comprising practitioners in the relevant
field who work closely with the CISI to identify topics and trends of interest
for discussion, for articles in The Review
magazine or for planning events.
Our Interest Group events are open to non-members and draw in a wide range of
professionals who are interested and connected to the financial services sector.
Young Professionals Network
With the intent of nurturing the next generation of professionals in the sector, we
have invested considerable time and resources in the past year to cultivate the
talent pipeline carving out their careers in our sector. We created a sub brand for
this younger segment of our membership, notably the under 35s but inclusive to all
professionals who are new or returning
to financial services, and we opened our programme of activity with a launch event
in London in September 2018. We created a dedicated microsite to draw together some
of the elearning, events, materials and products that we already had on our
platforms to curate and tailor a stream of content that specifically resonates with
this group.
We also began to commission articles for The Review and to write online learning
modules to add to the platform. Accompanying our digital programme, we built an
initial programme of events
in London, focusing on the soft skills that our market research and member focus
groups told us they wanted, which was then expanded to other major cities across the
UK. The topics for these ranged from personal branding and networking skills to
coping with stress and mindfulness. The initiative has been very successful, and it
is now our intention to widen the rollout to include our international membership
and to start to build communities of young ambassadors across the world in 2019 and
beyond.
Mandatory CPD
We introduced mandatory CPD requirements for all our members (not students) in 2018,
with professionals expected to complete either ten or 35 hours of structured and
unstructured professional learning throughout the year. As integrity and ethics runs
through our core, it is also a requirement of members to ensure that 10% of their
requirement covers ethical and integrity content. We introduced newly badged digital
learning and events this year in order to ensure
all members had access to dilemmas and training to enhance their knowledge, skills
and behaviour in this area.
CISI TV
Our bespoke video CPD content continues to thrive with over 80,773 video views (from
132 CPD event videos) on the platform in the past year. We have filmed more than 219
events, interviews and features which continues to enrich our CPD offering
for members. Video and animation is integrated in everything we do and used across
all channels and we will continue to invest in new opportunities, including virtual
and augmented reality, podcasts, and, as we develop the technological
infrastructure, downloadable content too.
Personalisation and digitisation
We understand that members in our community receive so much information in a working
day, so we want to ensure that the content sent from us is relevant, appropriate and
tailored to individual needs. We are making strides towards personalising our online
member platforms, including our elearning platform Professional Refresher, MyCISI
and The Review online. This process will continue to evolve as our technology
advances.
International branding
Our brand is recognised in over 100 countries around the world, with candidates
taking globally portable exams and members joining our global community throughout
the year. So our brand work in 2019 has reflected this, with a significant campaign
at the start of the year in over 50 countries with billboards, financial centre
advertising, banner promotions in transport hubs and
a complex programmatic (targeted digital adverts) and paid social campaign. All of
this work contributes to us driving up standards and awareness and encourages
professionals to use and be proud of their designations with us.
Chartered Body Alliance
Our partnership with our Alliance partners continued this year with joint events on
SMCR and ethical practices in artificial intelligence. We held joint fringe events
at the UK major political party conferences in September and exhibited at City Week
and CityUK events. We jointly gave advice to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
to reconsider their abolishment of the Approved Persons Register and asked our
members to respond to their consultation
which resulted in the FCA proposing a new Directory to help consumers. Finally, we
invested in a joint advertising campaign to consumers to raise awareness of our work
and encourage them to pursue advice from a professional who belongs to a Chartered
body.
General Data Protection Regulation
As with all businesses in May 2018, we had to accurately assess what data we had,
how we use it and how we store it. We saw the new legislation as an opportunity to
review our privacy, digital and other policies and created a new communications
dashboard for our members to be much more in control of what information they want
from us. We had over 18,000 members update their preferences
in the summer of 2018, with that number increasing throughout the year. We remain
committed to ensuring that we adhere to the regulations and meet our customer and
member needs also.