Page 22 - Profile's Unit Trusts & Collective Investments - September 2025

How to use this book

The regulatory exams, which are administered nationally by appointed examining bodies, focus
on the application of factual knowledge in two areas:
R Relevant legislation, the rights and duties of services providers and their clients, and the
implications of these provisions; and
R The competence of FSPs to apply these provisions correctly in rendering financial services
within specific categories or subcategories.

Credit-based qualifications
Credit bearing qualifications registered on the NQF are one way in which FSPs can obtain the
necessary qualifications to meet the requirements of fit and proper.
NQF credit bearing qualifications are made up of a number of unit standards, each of which has
a credit allocation. A learning programme which meets the requirements of a cluster of these unit
standards and which is registered with SETA as a skills programme, will provide credits towards the
necessary fit and proper qualifications.
An NQF unit standard is an outcome or syllabus rather than a study guide. A unit standard specifies
the competencies that learners should have achieved once they have completed the unit standard
(ie, what they should know and be able to do).
In order to assist learners preparing for a NQF registered credit based qualification, the chapter
content of Profile’s Unit Trusts & Collective Investments is structured in order to provide, as far as
possible, suitable reference material. At the same time, the content continues to provide a useful
technical reference which allows advisers to remind themselves of key rules and facts.
NQF and the Unit Trusts Handbook
Profile’s Unit Trusts & Collective Investments is not a study guide nor a text book. It does, however,
contain a great deal of information which is excellent preparation for a number of the unit standards
which make up both the FET level 4 (66613) and NQF level 5 (66611) certificates in Wealth
Management – especially those, obviously, which deal with collective investments.
The FET and NQF unit standards sometimes require students to do research, evaluate current
market conditions, or prepare comparisons between different products. Some of the necessary
reference material will be found in this publication, and in some cases similar comparisons are made
in the chapters which illustrate one approach to this work. However, this handbook is not exhaustive,
and learners must not assume that everything they need is contained herein. On the contrary, it is
imperative that financial advisers learn how to acquire and absorb information from various sources
and integrate this into a coherent and complete understanding of particular products or markets.
To assist learners in “mapping” the chapter content of this book to the requirements of each unit
standard, the specific outcomes covered in each chapter are referenced in the marginal notes.
For a number of reasons, the structure of the unit standards and the chapters of the book are not
synchronised. (In fact, in terms of flow and readability, such synchronisation is not possible in a book
of this nature.) This means that material relevant to a particular unit standard outcome might be
found in several places in the handbook.
In view of this, the matrix (pages 21 to 23) provides an outline of the unit standard outcomes, and
the chapter sections relevant to each.
CPD (continuing professional
development)
Continuing professional development (CPD) is defined in
the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA)’s NQFpedia
(standard glossary of terms) as “a range of learning activities through which professionals ensure that
they retain their capacity to practice safely, effectively and legally within the scope of practice.”
Profile’s Unit Trusts & Collective Investments is a FInancial Planning Institute (FPI) approved
publication. CPD points/hours may be claimed by members of the FPI under the category of
Professional Reading and Research as defined in the FPI’s CPD policy, which may be downloaded
from www.fpi.co.za.

20 Profile’s Unit Trusts & Collective Investments September 2025