Under the RDR programme of reforms – which are aimed at driving up the independence and standard of financial advice in the UK – after 2012 advisors will be obliged to carry out 35 hours of retail-relevant CPD per year – 14 of which can be what the Financial Services Authority calls “unstructured learning”, such as reading professional publications. The CISI publications available for download are: the Securities & Investment Review, Regulatory Update and Investment Management Review.

Not only have the wealth managers been struggling to adapt to the sheer scale of the new FSA regulations, but failure to implement the changes and to complete the mandatory 35 hours of CPD could have serious repercussions for those involved.

For their part, advisors, who are already hard-pushed with new minimum QCF Level Four qualifications coming in 2013, will no doubt welcome the chance to be able to fulfil some of their CPD requirements at their convenience, and on the go. The CISI’s app has also been designed to be user-friendly, as the time spent reading will be automatically uploaded to advisors’ CPD logs.

“The changes to CPD are very significant for the retail financial services industry and for the first time the detail of CPD will be measured, monitored and audited to comply with the Financial Services Authority requirements. This is particularly important in light of the RDR where there is a requirement for all retail advisors to complete annual CPD,” said Simon Culhane, chief executive of the CISI.

Free to all members and available to download from the CISI website at cisi.org/app, the new app is compatible with iPhone or iPad running IOS 4.2 and above, and Android smartphones running Android OS 2.1 and above. The launch of the CISI’s CPD app continues a rising trend for the launch of smartphone and tablet apps by all manner of financial institutions – for both employees and clients.

Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Citi Private Bank, Clariden Leu and Deutsche Bank are just a few of the firms to have recently unveiled apps. Variously, these allow bankers to trade on the go, view clients’ holdings or give clients themselves access to real-time updates on the valuation of their portfolios. This trend looks certain to continue as clients increasingly demand high-tech capabilities such as mobile banking: figures from Juniper Research suggest that by 2012 more than 150 million people will view their bank details through their mobile phones.