I am always impressed by how much Financial Planners do year round to help consumers. They give up free time and sometimes work time to help consumers understand the benefits of Financial Planning in its widest sense on a pro bono basis and, indeed, many give up their time and often their cash to volunteer in their local communities. It's a generous profession.

Crooks will always target pensions - that's a given - but that should not deter us from applauding the significant progress made this week in tackling scammers with a new law banning pension cold calling.

The changes to the taxation of transfers to Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Schemes (QROPS) has been received both positively and negatively by the pensions industry.

The whole ‘Chartered Body Alliance’ thing seems to have come out of nowhere to me. Clearly it has been brewing for a while and I think that it is a good thing for financial services.

Much debate is ongoing about the merits of being a Certified or Chartered Financial Planner, writes Keri Carter CFP^TM, managing director of Broadway Financial Planning.

I’m assuming that many of you have been in financial services/planning/advice for many years. It’s easy to get desensitised to the jargon, language and mental constructs that pervade our industry.

Paraplanning has never been so exciting. In June we had the 2017 CISI / IFP Paraplanner Conference and a couple of weeks ago we had the Report Writing HowWow from the Paraplanners PowWow movement. These two events had similar but different aims.

So the totem pole has been dismantled, the teepees taken down and all the Powwowers have moseyed on back to their ranches with the sun setting on another Paraplanners Powwow.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the word ‘intentionality’. Some things just happen, but most of the time there is something or someone influencing an outcome. We can influence by accident, or we can set out to do something deliberately.

A decade ago, I did something that seemed unlikely, if not impossible, fewer than 10 years earlier.