CISI for integrity, professionalism, excellence -Culhane

Ishara Jayawardane

The Sri Lanka Foundation (SLF) takes various initiatives to promote professionalism in diverse fields. Simon Culhane, CEO of CISI ( Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment), was recently in Sri Lanka to conduct a session at SLF. Presently, the SLF has partnered with CISI to launch two programs namely Combating Financial Crime and Global Financial Compliance. In line with Culhane's visit, SLF and CISI jointly launched an International Certificate in Wealth Management (ICWM) in Sri Lanka for the first time.

"I'm glad to be back in Sri Lanka. I come here every six months and today we will be giving some presentations and talking about the importance of integrity and trust and how you restore integrity in the Financial sector. In the West, at the moment the banks and financial institutions are really suffering from having lost that trust.

Here, people have a relatively good feeling about banks. In the West it is extremely bad; there is a huge cultural change taking place now among many banks as they realign their objectives. So it is much more about long term for all the stakeholders and not just the employees or the shareholders. Trust and Integrity are critical parts of business," said Simon Culhane.

People who go for the short term "Dash for Cash" run the risk of actually destroying their business and not keeping it for the long term. "Also we have a business here. We have two arms of our business. We employ 15 people, most of whom are in operations role, which cover all our work that we do in Asia and in the Gulf. They look after 10-15 thousand examinations administered from here. We have 40,000 members.

And then we have our qualifications business, run by a smaller team, where we are looking to increase the number of people who have an opportunity to learn and enter the financial industry. The institute being a charity, one of its goals is integrity and also to help people gain education. Because we are a charity we can take a long term view over these things and we try to keep the prices as competitive as possible."

CISI, in terms of its value, stands for the highest standards of integrity, professionalism and excellence. "People take our qualifications and they become professionals or experts in their fields. But professionalism is much more than taking qualifications. You should know how to apply the skills that you have learnt, staying up to date, behaving with integrity, when you are executing transactions or a relationship. All three are important - knowledge, skills and behavior. That is what makes a professional. That is what this institute stands for."

In the West, you could say that the finance industry has had a mixed history. It has been very cyclical. "Right now in the West, the finance industry is probably at the bottom of a trough. It is recovering from a very big breakdown. Not only financial losses, not only a loss of profit but also a loss of trust. So the Western side is not so good. In Asia the finance industry has been growing and it is a success story. While there are a few question marks over some of the governance issues, broadly speaking finance in Asia has been successful.

And it is well thought of. I would say from a global perspective : Down in the west and up in the East! In Asia, we have offices in Mumbai, Singapore and here in Colombo. In Singapore all our examinations attract a 50 percent rebate by the monetary authority, because they want to set up Singapore as a major operations and financial centre.

They do that by encouraging training. They are very pleased about our qualifications which are of high standard. The Singaporeans go up the value chain and they are doing very successfully."

CISI has very good success in their qualifications in Singapore. "In India we probably spend more of our time providing operational qualifications than we do for other areas and a lot amongst the BPOs and the outsourcing which is now huge in India. It makes a huge part of its turnover. Most big banks will be using our qualifications, as they raise the skill level so that they can attract more jobs. If you can look at the number of jobs coming to India, there is a question mark.

Why are they coming to India and not to Sri Lanka? They are finding many people who have the ability and knowledge partly through our qualifications, who are able to take those jobs on. We have had quite an influential impact in helping to attract jobs, and the whole point of the institute is that you educate people and they will get good jobs in the process."

CISI is dominant in the UK. "We have probably 30,000 exams taking place in the UK . We have 17,000 qualified members. We are accredited by the educational regulator. Our relationship with the Sri Lanka Foundation is entering its second year.

We are delighted to work with such a forward looking institute and its excellent leadership. They already teach some of our qualifications, particularly in Global Financial Compliance. We hope they will teach other ones too. They have arranged for us today to host our debate and seminar on integrity and trust because they also share our values. The trust and confidence is extremely important in the financial sector."

CISI was founded 21 years ago. It came out of and was founded from the London Stock Exchange which is 210 years old. It carried on during many of the stock exchanges functions. It became a world chartered body four years ago.

"When you take into consideration the scope of the qualifications we now offer; we offered three exams in 1992. Now we offer over 50. We operate in four distinct areas, Wholesale, Retail, Operations and Specialist. We offer them at different levels , Entry level, Advanced and even Masters level. There is a huge grid for what we offer. Such as pathways for people to start in various different segments.

We used to offer our qualifications in just one country. Now there are 78 countries and over 10,000 taken outside of the UK. We used to have just a few members. Now there are 40,000 members. 20,000 of them are qualified and over the time we have built up reserves. So despite being a charity you can depend upon our financial stability so you can carry out your plans. So there has been a huge amount of change over the last 21 years."

When asked as to what the organization would like to achieve in the near future, Culhane said, "If we look at our organization in Sri Lanka, we'd like to be as well known and respected like CIMA. We would like people to consider not just doing a degree in accounting but doing some financial qualifications. And we would also like to see many more firms coming to Sri Lanka and growing the finance industry."