New Chapter for Wise Monkey

This spring turned into a season of activity and new beginnings.

I’m excited to announce various developments and new benefits to our Wise Monkey Training. Indeed, we’re positively bursting with news!

Accreditation

In March 2023,  we had our Wise Monkey Financial Coach Practitioner Certificate Training accredited by an independent body: The Institute for Financial Wellbeing (IFW).

The IFW is a non-profit, membership organisation set up entirely with the remit of moving the financial services sector away from selling products and towards protecting and enabling financial wellbeing for all its clients.

This is, of course, completely in line with our own goals. And securing an appropriate, external stamp of approval is something I personally have long aspired to for the Wise Monkey training.

Coaching Qualification

In April 2023, we created a new pathway – open to all our alumni, current and past – to a tailored, recognised, coaching and mentoring qualification.

Our vision was always to find a way to enable anyone who completes our Financial Coach Practitioner Certificate training to earn a nationally recognised qualification that builds on the high quality of training we deliver.  

Love Your Coaching, run by Charlie Warshawski, offer a range of Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) coaching qualifications. After many months of consultation, Charlie has created a bespoke fast-tracked programme, especially designed for Wise Monkey alumni, leading to an ILM level 5 certification in effective coaching and mentoring.

Coaching is a core skill that's deeply embedded into our training and is at the heart of our work as financial coaches. So, again, I’m thrilled to announce this exciting and congruent development. This will provide external validation to both our alumni, and their clients, that their coaching skills are of a high standard. 

I believe this will work brilliantly to help consolidate and build confidence on the pure coaching side of our work for everyone who completes our Wise Monkey training.

A thriving, professional community

After completing the Wise Monkey training programme, alumni carry their work out into the world through their own practices.

With rapid growth of financial coaching across the UK, we wanted to help our community continue to maintain the highest level of quality and professional standards for their clients. 

We're excited to now also offer our alumni membership to our Wise Monkey community – a thriving hub, where the ethos is to offer a welcoming and supportive, peer-led environment where all members can continually develop their skills together and on an on-going basis.

Live sessions twice a month, keep them growing, accountable, connected and enhancing their skills and business practice. There's an online platform to watch replays of past sessions, and access a vast resource library to support their business and professional skills.

Our ethics

A small dedicated team has also been working hard behind the scenes over the past six months, in consultation with our wider community, to formalise our Wise Monkey 'Code of Ethics'.

A strong ethical sense is what drove me, personally, to form Wise Monkey in the first place – that and my passion for the whole concept of financial coaching, and its incredible potential to empower.

So I’m delighted that we’ve now drawn this underlying set of core principles together into a formal code. At its heart sit these key values: empathy, empowerment, high quality, independence, integrity, respect and transparency

To share our core values, we’ve created a Wise Monkey badge. All our alumni will be free to display this on their own websites – aligning their work with Wise Monkey’s essence – and it’ll link directly to our newly-devised Code.

All these pieces of news reflect, for me, the start of a significant new chapter in the life of Wise Monkey, and I’m thrilled that we’re at this stage of development and maturity as a collaborative, living, breathing community.

New trainer

Finally, I’m delighted to welcome Sara Maxwell to our training team. Sara originally trained with us in January 2020 after 20 years in financial services. She has tons of coaching experience – she’s also an ICF (International Coaching Federation) PCC (Professional Certified Coach). And she has a beautiful energy, and brings a wealth of new ideas. I know she will benefit our team enormously.

Sara, in turn, says she’s excited to join our team:

‘I found my own experience of the Wise Monkey training transformative. Today, as a direct result, I work full time in my own financial coaching business, Wealth-coach.co.uk. So I’m bringing all that day-to-day, practical experience of coaching into the training context. I love to see the trainees build in confidence, and make the tools and skills their own. I like modelling that – which, in my case, means bringing lots of zest, energy and colour. And it’s also a great team for me to join – I think we all complement each other really well – and Simonne herself is so open and easy and thoughtful, she deeply cares that everyone’s okay. I’m thrilled to be onboard.’

So… reams of good news from us at Wise Monkey.

Doors are open to applications for our next 10-week Wise Monkey Financial Coach Training… Register now if you're interested in joining us. Small group sizes guaranteed to ensure a high trainer-to-participant ratio, providing plenty of opportunity for you to practise, and perfect the skills and tools you learn throughout the course.