CEO Statement 7 April 2020

By Lora Benson | Apr 08, 2020

As the health crisis continues to unfold around the world, we continue to step up our efforts to assist the professionals we represent across our global community. As we move into a second calendar month of the business world working very differently we wanted to share with you the things we are actively doing to ensure that you have everything you need:

  1. Working tirelessly to bring exam candidates in every region the opportunity to sit their exams remotely. More details on this to follow in the next two weeks. Our current list of exam venue closures can be found here.
  2. Answering all your enquiries – our customer support team based in UK and Sri Lanka are ready to answer your questions, it might be taking them a little longer to respond to you but we are very much operational and helping you where we can. Thank you for your patience and support. Here is the contact email if you need anything from us: customersupport@cisi.org.
  3. Promoting our new virtual events programme – we know you value our event programme and with over 500 offered per year it is quite an undertaking to look at how we do this differently. We’ve moved as many as we can into our new virtual programme so we can continue to meet your CPD requirements and together increase our knowledge, build new skills and shine a spotlight on integrity and ethical behaviour. The good news is that content that might only have been available in one area of the world will now be accessible to any CISI member despite their location.
  4. Opening up new opportunities – have you ever considered joining our team of external specialists to help us shape exams and digital e-learning for the next generation of financial services professionals? Here is more information if you might be able to commit even a small amount of time
  5. Actively working with our Accredited Training Partners to provide our 20,000 students around the work with continued e-learning and materials they need and identifying new opportunities to work in partnership.
  6. Supporting consumers and the general public with guides from our CFP professionals and Accredited Financial Planning Firms on things to consider with your finances in uncertain times. More on this to follow next week.
  7. Helping our members to renew their membership with us for another year – we are immensely proud of our easily accessible digital content which ranges from relevant and topical news articles and features in The Review to our extensive online learning modules – over 180 of them – on everything from Bitcoin to Anti Money Laundering. Could you learn something new today from one of our bitesize online packages?
  8. Looking after our CISI colleagues in the eight offices around the world as they are so important to us. They are the glue that holds together the Institute. All of our staff are now working remotely. Some have more challenging situations than others, with some colleagues in Colombo having to queue for hours to access supermarkets to feed their families, but we couldn’t be prouder of how quickly our team have adapted and embraced the opportunity to work differently. Thank you to you all.


Simon Culhane
Chief Executive