Meet Michaela Pashley, Managing Director of Practical Financial Exams Limited

This month Vicki caught up with Michaela Pashley, Managing Director of Practical Financial Exams Limited.

Read on to learn about Michaela’s mission to transform the training and professional development journey for financial advisers and planners.

Can you tell the readers a bit about yourself and your training company? What’s the businesses mission? And what’s your personal mission?

My name is Michaela. I live in Glasgow, and I’m the Managing Director of Practical Financial Exams (PFE) Limited, which is not just a training company, but also a qualifications provider.

My personal mission is to improve the financial adviser experience of training, qualifications, and CPD.

Several years ago, I started my first role as a financial adviser with a national firm. By that time, I was a Chartered Financial Planner, but I quickly realised that none of the qualifications I’d gained had adequately prepared me for the day-to-day challenges of my role.

While my technical knowledge was strong, I had no idea about fact-finding, risk profiling, objective setting, cashflow modelling, or suitability report writing.

Fast forward to 2020, and I’m Head of Training and Knowledge at SimplyBiz. I had the idea of putting together a new qualification – not a training course, but a qualification. The idea was to give advisers all those soft and practical skills that I felt were missing from the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) assessments.

This became our flagship qualification, SCQF Level 9 Practical Investment Planning – THE soft and practical skills qualification for financial advisers.

After getting the qualification recognised by both the CII and the London Institute for Banking and Finance (LIBF) as credits towards their advanced diploma qualifications, and with a proper business strategy in place, I decided to take the leap and go full-time.

I was selling this fantastic qualification, while delivering private training days for firms on a range of different topics. It was an incredibly exciting time.

In 2025, I launched my Annual Rolling CPD Plan, which provides advisers with 36 hours of live, structured CPD a year. This is a far more interactive and higher-quality alternative to text- and video-based online CPD modules – one that genuinely enhances advisers’ knowledge and skills.

Your journey to where you are now is incredibly inspiring. Looking back, what defining moments in your life shaped your passion for raising the standards in financial planning?

When I started in my first financial planning role as a young and arrogant Chartered Financial Planner, I remember looking across the desk at my first ever client and realising that I had no idea what I was doing.

This feeling of utter helplessness has been a core memory for me, and a huge part of the inspiration behind SCQF Level 9 Practical Investment Planning.

My second defining moment was more recent. A small(ish) yet highly respected IFA had hired us to provide their annual CPD plan.

Until the end of 2024, PFE offered an online Learning Management System that we’d outsourced from a third party. The system was good, but the CPD was mostly text-based, and the platform wasn’t the most user-friendly.

Further, there was a lot of administration involved for the advisers in logging their CPD, and also for me when going through everything to understand the CPD they were doing. This led to me losing the client, which was the wake-up call that change was needed.

I ended our relationship with the third-party provider and took my CPD offering in-house. I now offer live workshop-based CPD – the Rolling 36-Hour Annual CPD Plan.

Many people talk about success, but few define it personally. For you, does success lie in changing the profession, transforming individual advisers, or something else entirely?

Success for me is less about “changing the profession”, and far more about developing individual advisers and their businesses.

I love working with advisers and knowing that I’ve made a real difference to their technical knowledge, the way they work with clients, and ultimately, their bottom line.

You’re clear that CPD should be more than a regulatory box-ticking exercise. In your view, what does it take to turn an adviser from competent to truly transformational for clients?

It depends entirely on the adviser and what motivates them. Advisers are individuals with different natural skill sets and the key to creating superstars is to understand what makes them tick.

For most advisers, spending less time focused on technical knowledge and more on soft and practical skills will develop their clients’ experiences effectively and quickly.

Your level 6 accredited course brings a different level of skill to advisers, technically and empathetically. What’s one skill or quality you believe is most overlooked in traditional adviser training, but absolutely critical for the future?

There are so many, but the one I’m going with is objective setting. Being able to effectively engage with clients to draw out what’s important to them, taking down their own words, and developing a comprehensive SMART financial planning objective.

With AI becoming more prevalent, clients with simpler objectives may find themselves easily catered for in future. Advisers will be left with those clients with more complex objectives. So, being able to understand and articulate these objectives will become an invaluable skill.

I’d also like to make an honourable mention to capacity for loss calculation and evaluation.

I rarely see a robust, repeatable, methodical, mathematical process for capacity for loss calculation in the files I’ve seen, nor a critical evaluation of the effect the client’s capacity for loss has on the overall risk profile.

The financial advice profession is sometimes criticised for being slow to evolve. What’s the one thing you believe needs to change today to ensure advisers truly serve the next generation of clients?

Financial planning has reacted quickly to some huge changes over the last twenty years or so.

• Pension simplification and the relevant property regime in 2006 turned pensions and Inheritance Tax (IHT) planning on their heads, yet advisers adapted.
• The introduction of the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) in 2012, drove higher standards of qualification. Again, advisers adapted.
• Just two years later in 2014, George Osborne who was the chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, announced Pension Freedoms – a landmark piece of legislation – and both advisers and product providers adapted.
• In 2019, the FCA introduced the Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SM&CR), and advisers adapted to a completely new regulatory framework.
• In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and advisers quickly embraced new technology such as Zoom and Teams.
• In 2023, another massive regulation landed in the form of the Consumer Duty.

Over the last 20 years or so, we’ve also seen a huge shift away from old-school life offices (financial institutions that offer life insurance and other financial services) to high-tech platforms.

What advisers will need to be wary of is the rise of AI-based direct-to-consumer (D2C) “advice”. Advisers will need to ensure they’re offering a sufficiently empathetic, human-centric service that is capable of truly understanding client needs and creating bespoke financial plans to cater for them.

This approach will support the development of long-term trust-based relationships not only with current clients, but with their children.

You provide business owners with full control over their advisers’ CPD journeys. How does that shift the dynamics between firms, advisers, and clients—and what impact do you hope this will have in the long run?

Even within a small firm, no two advisers are the same. Different advisers seem to attract, and be attracted to, different kinds of people with different needs.

My CPD plan enables advisers within firms to select the workshops most relevant to them and their day-to-day work.

There’s no point mandating that some poor adviser attends a six-hour protection workshop when he has no interest in it. If I were his boss, I’d much rather he attended CPD that legitimately enhanced what he does day-to-day because it’s relevant to his business and client bank.

My hope is that firms notice this and can trust that, regardless of which workshops are selected, their advisers are getting quality CPD that will drive the business forward.

You’ve designed a platform that doesn’t just train advisers – it shapes them. If an adviser completing your programme could tell you one thing years from now that would mean you’d done your job right, what would you want to hear?

“Michaela, I am now the CEO of the biggest advice firm in the UK and, hence, I’m totally minted. I couldn’t have done this without you. Here’s a cheque for £10 million and two Hawaiian Islands.”

Okay, so I’m clearly being only half-serious here, but I am completely serious that I love to hear success stories.

To this day, I have advisers contacting me who completed SCQF Level 9 Practical Investment Planning back in 2020 and 2021 – the good old days. These “OGs” tell me how well they’re doing now and how my little contribution was invaluable in helping them get where they are.

But to be honest, just the knowledge that an adviser is better than they were the day before is a truly wonderful reward in itself.

Your story and work challenge perceptions in many ways. If there’s one misconception you wish more people in the financial planning profession would let go of, what would it be – and why?

The entire profession seems to be obsessed with “technology for the sake of technology” just now.

I’m a big believer in tech when it genuinely enhances the client experience.

For example, being able to deliver client meetings on Zoom or Teams is a phenomenal leap forward. Also, investment platforms have great tech, which is a huge improvement over telephone-based valuations and paper-based fund switches.

I’m also a big believer in tech when advisers genuinely understand how it works.

However, many advisers are using technology – in particular, packaged cashflow modelling products – without understanding how they work. This has resulted in serious errors within suitability reports. When challenged, the advisers admit they don’t know or understand how it works, but this is what the firm wants them to use.

I feel that tech for tech’s sake and the failure to understand technology being employed could cause advisers to stop thinking for themselves, which could lead to errors that may genuinely harm clients.

Get in touch

If you’d like to learn more about Michaela Pashley and the services Practical Financial Exams Limited provides, email contact@practicalfinancialexams.co.uk.

The Melo team would love to hear from you too! Hit us up by email at hello@melo.co.uk or call us on 0113 4656 111.