Paradigm Mortgage Services is celebrating the one-year anniversary of its CPD & Sales Academy, with advisers having logged over 114,000 minutes of activity during the last 12 months.

Launched last year to help advisers reach and maintain their CPD hours under the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) rules, the CPD & Sales Academy is a central hub where advisers can access a range of content.

It now includes content from over 29 different lenders and providers, plus organisations such as the FCA and FIBA.

There are now 753 registered users of the system who have between them logged 114,817 minutes (or 1,913 hours) of activity. The Academy is available to individuals operating at all levels of a firm including advisers, paraplanners and directors.

The Academy allows individual users to access and record all CPD they have undertaken during any given year – the IDD introduced a minimum requirement of 15 hours CPD for all staff who sell, advise on or transact insurance customers, as well as those that assist in the administration or performance of the contracts.

In the last year the Academy has introduced a Master User Function, which allows principals or compliance directors at a firm to monitor all the activity recorded by their team via the Academy.

The Academy also includes Paradigm’s recently-published eBooks on the requirements under SMCR and tackling mortgage fraud.

Riona Mulherin, head of marketing & operations at Paradigm Mortgage Services, said: “Our CPD & Sales Academy has proven to be extremely popular and successful over the course of the last 12 months, to such an extent that in June this year we won the AIG CPD Academy Champion Award at AIG Life’s Annual Quality Awards. What we have tried to do is take the often arduous task of completing, recording and tracking CPD hours and make it as simple as possible for individuals, and now at a firm level those in charge of CPD are also able to oversee all that activity in order to ensure the firm is meeting its regulatory requirements.

“We continue to expand the range of resources, support and material we have within the Academy, and are growing the range of lenders, providers and organisations who are can provide this information in order to raise industry standards and to help advisers feel comfortable in their own development.

“Within the Academy there is exclusive content, and we have a mix of different types, whether that be webinars, event registration, video, podcasts or pdfs. New content is added weekly, so the Academy ensures advisers are kept up to date with all the latest developments. Offering advisers the facility to record CPD provides them with a clear and easy means of seeing how much they have done so far, and how many hours are left to complete. It has been a busy first year and we hope that more DA advisers will take up the opportunity to use the Academy and take control of their CPD.”