General insurance (GI) provider Paymentshield has achieved official CPD-certified status for the learning modules on its GI Academy.

Paymentshield says these are the first independently verified CPD courses for GI that are freely available to all UK financial advisers regardless of their preferred provider.

Accredited by the independent body CPD Certification Service, the modules are intended to plug any gaps in financial advisers’ knowledge about GI, help them to diversify their services, and ultimately generate more income through increasing GI sales.

Now live, the CPD resources include modules on the value of selling GI; information on regulatory changes; and insight into home insurance, mortgage protection, landlord insurance and tenants’ contents products.

The Right Mortgage network is now using the GI Academy CPD resources as part of its training for new advisers.

Amy Wilson, head of general insurance at The Right Mortgage, said: “We were already familiar with Paymentshield’s GI Academy, but gaining the independent CPD course certification has given us that extra reassurance that this is market-leading, quality GI training. Having this readily available means that we don’t need to develop our own GI training programme, and allows us to use our time and resources supporting our advisers in other ways.”

In the six months since the resources originally went live on the GI Academy (before achieving the independent CPD status), they have been downloaded 1300 times, with the most popular modules being an Introduction to GI and Home Insurance.

Louise Pengelly, proposition director at Paymentshield, added: “Gaining this official CPD stamp forms part of our continued efforts to raise standards across the industry. The GI Academy is helping networks to provide more robust, dedicated GI training than they might previously have had access to, and it’s available for advisers to access at any point in their career – not just when they initially join a network. In addition, we know that advisers don’t want to waste time hunting for CPD, so the fact that we’ve made our resources accessible to all will hopefully help make their lives easier.

“We also know advisers regularly miss opportunities to sell GI – our most recent research into this revealed that 60% of advisers say they regularly overlook GI sales opportunities. We hope that our newly accredited CPD resources can help to significantly reduce that statistic.”

Collectively, the modules currently available contribute approximately 6.5 hours of structured learning (based on reading time) towards the 15-hour CPD requirement that forms part of the Insurance Distribution Directive. Additional resources including ebooks, whitepapers and on-demand events are also available to contribute to the CPD requirement.