SAIF Golden Charter

Support for every partner

This year, Golden Charter is supporting funeral directors to meet their professional development goals and connect with customers. Commercial Director Mark Moran discusses the support the plan provider offers funeral director partners to meet FCA requirements in 2023, with a comprehensive CPD programme. He also reflects on the huge success of its introducer appointed representative partners.

eLearning is CPD

As a plan seller or approved person of an appointed representative business, Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulation requires you to complete at least 15 hours of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) annually.

We’re making meeting the CPD requirement straightforward for our appointed representative partners with our regular mandatory eLearning modules which constitute over half of the CPD time. The eLearning acts as an extension to your existing good practices and helps cement the important information appointed representatives need to continue to deliver an excellent, regulatory compliant service for funeral plan customers.

Our first module provides a helpful introduction to CPD andis to be completed by all approved persons and plan sellers. We’ve also launched an additional module for approved persons containing important information about their roles and responsibilities.

The introduction to CPD and approved person modules begin the series of customer-focused learning and are now available to complete at a time that suits you before 29 July. Over the coming months, we’ll launch further modules that cover handling customer complaints, financial promotions and consumer duty. The eLearning will help strengthen your confidence in carrying out regulated sales and help you meet the FCA requirement.

CPD in everyday activities

Your CPD is more than likely already underway, as lots of things you do as part of your own professional development will count towards the requirement. In addition to the mandatory eLearning, we’ll also provide a range of content to choose from and make up the remainder of the 15 hour requirement.

We’re continually expanding our suite of free CPD resources hosted on mygoldencharter.co.uk. Here, plan sellers and approved persons can access content that’s relevant to their own role and development needs.

Our CPD resources include our mystery shopping module we launched at the end of last year. This has already helped hundreds of our partners complete and log their first CPD activity and learn simple tips for improving a customer’s experience.

Remember, CPD helps to turn many of the good customer and business-focused things you’re already doing into evidenced CPD. Lots of activities can count towards CPD, such as attending meetings, seminars and webinars, reading articles and listening to relevant podcasts. To help you identify what you can count as CPD, we’ll include our lightbulb logo on relevant materials we send to you. You can choose from the range of content we provide on mygoldencharter.co.uk or complete CPD you come across yourself.

The great news is that your eLearning modules automatically update your CPD record for you. You should log all other CPD on mygoldencharter.co.uk including any CPD undertaken since becoming an appointed representative. Your Golden Charter business manager will be able to help you with the CPD you may have already completed.

You may have noticed our CPD competition*, where everyone who logs CPD on mygoldencharter.co.uk before 17 February is entered into a draw to win an iPad. Make sure you’ve logged CPD in time to be in with a chance of winning.

Another great way to offer funeral plans

We know that many of you have been incredibly busy with at-need funerals for a considerable period of time. We understand that being busy can make it more difficult to focus on pre-need conversations.

If you’re an introducer appointed representative, your business captures the contact information of anyone who enquires about a funeral plan and passes this information to our dedicated team. We then get in touch with the customer to understand what they want and need from a funeral plan and talk them through their options using your own prices. If they choose to take out a plan, one of our experienced, fully trained colleagues then guides them through the sales journey.

We’re delighted that our introducer appointed representative model is going from strength to strength. Customers are responding extraordinarily well to their enquiry being taken by their trusted independent funeral director and followed up by our team of trained professionals. We’ve secured a funeral plan sale for almost all introducer appointed representatives who’ve referred a customer to us. What’s more is nearly three in five referred customers have already gone on to purchase a plan.

McNulty Funeral Service

As one of the first businesses to introduce a customer to Golden Charter under our introducer appointed representative model, funeral director Jenny McNulty found it easy to explain the new process to customers.

Together, our contact centre team has more than 30 years’ experience in taking the time to guide customers through the purchase of the Golden Charter plan that’s right for them. We can tailor the customer’s plan to include requests specific to a particular burial or coffin type, for example. With the right information in place, we’re able to offer customers the same level of choice as they would have when taking out a plan with a funeral director, using your own pricing structure. This is central to our commitment to not only our partners but also to ensure we’re treating customers fairly.

As one of the very first customer sales concluded on behalf of an introducer appointed representative, thank you to funeral director Jenny McNulty for sharing her experiences.

Paul Stevenson Funeral Directors

Our latest Partnership Podcast features multiple Funeral Planner of the Year award-winner Paul Stevenson of Paul Stevenson Funeral Directors. Paul chose the introducer appointed representative route for his business as a quick fix ahead of regulation, with a view to becoming an appointed representative in time. More than six months on and he has no plans to switch models after seeing his conversion rate nearly double.

“People trust us as a funeral director, so they trust our choice in directing them to Golden Charter. Families ask me who I would recommend as a lawyer and I’ll introduce; or a financial adviser, say. So, we’re simply doing that with Golden Charter. People are trusting you. They’re still trusting you. And it’s been so easy, no adverse effects whatsoever. People have come to the door to say ‘that’s the plan in’, ‘I’ve got it through’.

“When we get the plans in, there’s always a letter from Golden Charter saying you were the introducer, so we know and we can trace who we’ve introduced.

The staff at Golden Charter are better at selling than I am. Simple as that.”

Excerpt taken from our latest Partnership Podcast with Paul Stevenson of Paul Stevenson Funeral Directors, which can be found at goldencharter.buzzsprout.com Remember, listening to our podcasts can count towards CPD for our appointed representative partners.

If you have any feedback on your experience as an introducer appointed representative or would like to find out more about the model, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Speak to your Golden Charter business manager or email partner@goldencharter.co.uk.

Have you seen our all-new email newsletter yet? Each month we’ll provide our partners with key updates from us at Golden Charter as well as a round-up of industry news and information to support your service to funeral plan customers.

This isn’t the only way we’ll keep you up to date. Be sure to check mygoldencharter.co.uk, particularly the new and improved news and resources areas, for access to regular updates and a copy of the latest newsletter.

* Terms and conditions are available here.