In the realm of financial services there is an array of exams one needs to pass, starting with the word “series” and followed by what seems an infinite number though, oddly, start with, like, a Series 3, skips to Series 6, then 7 all the way up to 99. There are 40 such exams and they hardly follow an obvious order; why not series 1 through series 40?
Of course there’s a cost to taking them so the authorities who dictate you have to pass them make money for the effort. Maybe they’re thinking of slipping more exams in between when they need more revenue. It’s a bit like the Merritt Parkway here in Connecticut. There’s an exit 42 and an exit 44, but no exit 43. Was one planned and then cancelled after, very likely, some local hedge fund manager didn’t want one near his house and ‘made a few calls’? Note that I think hedge fund people are exempt from the more trying exams.
I’ve never met anyone in the industry who thought any of these tests were worthwhile. You’d study for hours on end – scores of hours – take the exam, fail, do it again and finally pass. Within a few minutes of passing you’d forget pretty much everything you studied and never apply it anyway. At certain firms, actually I bet most firms, if you get too high a score you’re the object on intense and public derision because it meant you studied too hard. I got an honorable 77 on my Series 7 (and that with many hours of tutoring from the fellow who wrote the test) while my assistant at the time got a 93. What a tool.
Still, it’s a regulatory requirement – a rite of passage – and something to put on your resume not to prove any intellectual capability or skill, but simply to tell a prospective employer that you had this out of the way.
There are follow ups pressed upon the financial ‘professional’ by his or her compliance department who are only following orders and the dictates of FINRA, the Financial Industry National Rifle-Through-Your-Client Association. These are refreshers of sorts, which you don’t always need to pass but merely click on a box to answer a question, which shows the right answer. These tests force you to listen to some eternally lame scenario and determine from that what is the right or wrong thing to do.
Imagine this dialog between two junior stockbrokers (and, by the way, it makes no difference if you’re a stock broker, bond trader, back office data inputter or strategist…the exams were all the same).
Broker A — “Hey, I got this 106 year client with a low-risk portfolio who can’t hear me on the phone and think’s she’s living at home when she’s actually in an Alzheimer’s ward in New Rochelle. I could sell her this shit-hole of a stock, mark the price up, and make a pretty penny on the commission. Does that seem right to you?”
Broker B — “Does she have cash?”
Broker A — “No, but I was going to tell her to sell the XYZ shares she’s owned forever and earns a good dividend the really screw her on the price.”
QUESTION: Was Broker A acting in the best interest of his client? Yes__ No___ Not enough Information to determine___
QUESTION: What should broker B have done?
a. tell him no.
b. immediately notify compliance
c. see if the old lady had any friends who also need a financial advisor.
d. ask for photos and phone number of her granddaughter, in case she’s hot.
This seems so obvious it’s ludicrous. However, many people get it wrong not because they don’t know the answer but because they didn’t read the question and simply clicked while they were simultaneously bidding for something on Amazon or bilking an institutional client on some arcane security where price transparency is more opaque.
Other questions related to money laundering.
SCENARIO: “A client comes to you with a bag of cash, and a suspicious white powdery substance around his nostrils and asks you to open an account in the name of John Doe. Do you ask for a social security number first, or determine his investing experience?”
What about sexual harassment ? “A subordinate is wearing a low cut blouse. Is it appropriate to toss a quarter down her shirt and retrieve it with your tongue?”
Again, it’s hard to get these wrong unless tempted to give the wrong answer for the sake of testing the authorities. Don’t do that. You’ll probably pass the test anyway, but these are graded by machines and wouldn’t get the joke and just might flag you for further testing.
When I was with Mis-Informa, my very former employer, I had the chance for a different type of test because that firm took its bureaucratic procedures seriously and in abundance. Informa had nearly a dozen websites an employee needed to get into if said employee wanted access to his (or her) overall benefit overview, medical insurance account, dental plan, vision plan, 401k plan, and then the 401k provider, pay/W2 details, or the portal that bring this altogether, which really just is central bookmarking page so you can get to those other websites and then one via corporate communications that allows you to get tested. Each website needed a different username and password with different rules on creating the passwords. Oh and then there was Qwest for the initial drug test, and then the rehab facility depending on the results.
The last one that I had to create a password for was to assess my Code of Conduct. I found this out from an email, which took me to the portal and then to the ‘training site’ for the test. The course was to discover the refreshed (that was their word, refreshed) and standardised (they’re English so spelled it wrong) Code on topics ranging from data privacy, security, gifts and entertainment, tax and, get this, ‘and more!’ all to help us make the ‘right decision on the way we work.’
This also introduced me to two new websites, one for the method to report any concerns should the Code be challenged and then one if we had questions or advice for the compliance team. Even if I did, I wouldn’t want to open that can of worms.
I thought the ones about money laundering and sexual harassment were stupid. I know it takes place because why otherwise would anyone pay for the online training other than simply to employ some oversight group whose job it is to require such training and then get paid for it.
The course and test for the Code of Conduct made all the other ones look rather cerebral. It didn’t start off with anything biblical, but I couldn’t help but anticipate something like, “Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of a) salt, b) pepper, c) turmeric, d) margarine.”
No, this course wasn’t quite like that. It did however have illustrations to help along the way. The one about how environmentally sensitive the company is used abbreviations for paper I’d never heard of but which identified them from eco-friendly well managed forests. When asked about which is the best way to drink coffee in the office they showed a paper cup and a ceramic mug with the words ‘your name’ on it. Hmmm, I wonder what they getting at?
Then they showed two types of paper – one said recycled, the other did not – and you had to move the right one into the ‘proper’ box and the other one into the ‘not proper’ box. Proper in this example means the correct one for the company.
And the we had a nap break for milk and cookies.
If you are catching on you would have had no trouble with the next question. That showed two rubbish bins, garbage cans, in translation. One had the ‘recycle’ symbol on with the words ‘for recycling’ just below it and another that was blank. Which would you have moved into the ‘proper’ box?
The section on ethics was equally challenging. A scenario had you going away to a weekend meeting on short notice where you had a room and would be typing away on what was otherwise your free time. So you bring your wife (why are men always portrayed as the culprits?) and charge her meals and drinks at the mini bar to the company. Is that okay?
Even though part of me thinks it’s perfectly fine if you’re taking up MY weekend with a nonsensical meeting on short notice, or long for that matter, and if Mrs. Ader wants a drink by all means go for it; I certainly wouldn’t admit it on paper. In fact, I was so offended at spending time on this test I yelled over to the kitchen – “Pippa, make your self a martini and use the good stuff!”
So when the next slide said using company time for personal matters was wrong, I wanted to write in that using personal time for company matters was wrong as well. Alas there was no space allowing for that and as I wrote earlier I’m not about to get a new username and password to contact compliance with advice over this test.
I got a 90 on it. The reason I didn’t get 100 is that I didn’t put all the right symbols into the proper boxes because I’d never seen some before and was, at that moment, drinking a green-tea latte I’d earlier picked up from Starbucks in a paper cup and I think the testing thing detected it.
Somewhere in there they had even more symbols with the averment that the company doesn’t discriminate about age, sex, sexual orientation, race, religion and the whole lot. Clearly, they don’t discriminate much over intelligence either. The symbols included those male and female ones I never quite figure out – you know, the circle with like an arrow or a cross sticking out of it – along with one showing a cross AND an arrow and a others with two crosses and two arrowheads. I see what they’re getting at but it seemed rather much to make the point unless, and this just hit me, they hire illiterates or people for whom English is a second or third language or not a language at all.
Why then do they have to change the code on the men’s room every two weeks? Men of certain age sometimes have an urgency to go with that age and it seems discrimination to force them back to the receptionist to get the update. Ah, yet another password I have to remember.
It’s all funny, right? But just imagine the poor schnook who fails it. Or, worse, imagine the caliber of the people in the company that benefit from such an endeavor or create it thinking they’re clever. I mean, really. To them I ask, ‘ do you walk to school or do you take your lunch?’
There is a generic dumbing down going on so it’s not entirely fair to come down too hard on any one thing. Just the other day I was listening to a weather report on a local, Connecticut, station and bear in mind Connecticut is a well-educated state on average. So what do you think motivated the weatherman to say, “They got a whopping 6 inches of rain! That’s nearly half a foot!”
No it isn’t nearly half a foot. It’s fully half a foot. And who doesn’t know how many inches are in a foot? Did someone listening in, perhaps while trying to determine whether a ceramic coffee mug created less trash than a series of paper ones, think to himself (it had to be guy), “Hmm. Six inches! Wow. Nearly half a foot. I never thought of it that way. “
Is it any wonder that we failed to accept the metric system?