Access Financial Services has appointed Sue O’Brien as its new training and competency manager, strengthening its compliance and adviser development capability.

O’Brien (pictured) takes on a compliance-focused role and will be responsible for ensuring advisers and relevant staff across the business are appropriately qualified, skilled and competent to provide mortgage and protection advice, while avoiding poor customer outcomes or regulatory breaches. She starts this month.

She joins Access Financial Services from Finance Advice Centre, where she spent almost seven years working as a mortgage and protection adviser alongside roles in training and development.

Earlier in her career, O’Brien worked as a mortgage and protection adviser at Mansion Park. She also held senior operational roles at Bamford Mortgages and Hadenglen Home Finance, where she served as director of operations with responsibility for a team of 34 mortgage administrators.

ADVISER COMPETENCY

Nick Jones, mortgage sales and marketing director at Access Financial Services, said: “While we focus on hiring experienced mortgage brokers, we now have over 200 mortgage and protection advisers at Access FS and we need to provide a lot of great training not only to maintain the quality of our advice but also to help them develop their businesses and become more successful.

“While Sue will be involved with our in-house Broker Academy, which prepares new recruits for the CeMAP qualification, even the most experienced mortgage brokers need to maintain their skills amid changing products, rates and rules. Training is critical here and Sue will be absolutely central to its delivery.”

SUPERVISION AND ASSESSMENT

O’Brien added: “I am looking forward to looking at the Access policies and potentially redesigning the processes that are used to assess and monitor the competence of advisers, including for new entrants and experienced advisers.

“But I will also be involved with supervision and assessment, training delivery and coordination, recruitment and onboarding, record-keeping and reporting.”

O’Brien will work alongside Mark Prudhomme within the training and development team. She will report to head of training and competency Paul Bartliff, with the function sitting within the wider compliance structure under compliance director Jeremy Lock.

TRAINING BOOST

Jeremy Lock, compliance director at Access Financial Services, said: “We needed to bolster the training and competency team following the promotion of Michael Harrison to compliance manager recently.

“Access FS always looks to support our mortgage adviser community and part of that involves a commitment to training them — with a view to helping them grow their own businesses.”

The appointment follows the unveiling of the team behind Access Financial Services’ new Equality Council in December 2025.