After the licence: CPT hours you need each year

Once licensed, you must complete continuous professional training (CPT) every year. Under the SFC's Guidelines on Continuous Professional Training (January 2022), licensed representatives and bank relevant individuals need at least 10 CPT hours per calendar year, and responsible officers and executive officers at least 12. At least 5 of those hours must be directly relevant to the regulated activities you are licensed for. New joiners also need 2 hours on ethics in their first 12 months.

How many hours a year?

The hours are the same however many regulated activities you hold. People doing sponsor work or Takeovers Code work also need at least 2.5 hours a year on topics relevant to that work, which count towards the 5 relevant hours.

Ethics for new joiners

Within 12 months of first becoming licensed or registered, you must complete 2 hours on ethics: integrity, fairness, due care and diligence, acting in clients' best interests, avoiding conflicts of interest and keeping client information confidential. After that, at least 2 hours each calendar year must be on ethics or compliance. The new-joiner ethics hours count towards that year's requirement.

Licensed part way through the year

• Pro rata. If you are first licensed during the year, the hours are scaled to the licensed period. A representative licensed on 1 July needs 5 hours that year.
• Exam study counts. Training in the same calendar year before your licence date counts, including study hours for the competence exams, if you can prove the pass.
• No carry forward. Extra hours in one year cannot be used in the next.
• Changing jobs. Hours done at your old employer carry over. The new employer can rely on your declaration and evidence, and is not accountable for any shortfall at the old one.

What counts as CPT

The SFC accepts:

• courses, workshops, lectures and seminars, face to face or virtual
• distance learning with assignments
• self-study or online courses, with an independent assessment and records
• industry research, publishing papers, giving speeches and teaching
• commenting on industry consultation papers
• luncheon talks, counted as 0.5 hour

What generally does not count: normal work, reading the financial press or general professional literature, activities with no interaction with other people, and language courses. Repeating the same activity with the same content does not count either. SFC seminars on regulatory updates do count.

Examples of relevant topics at representative level: compliance and regulatory standards; business conduct and ethics; market developments, new products and risk management; communication skills; general law; basic accounting; economic analysis; fintech; ESG; cybersecurity; and IT.

Bank staff and responsible officers

Banks are registered institutions, and their staff are relevant individuals on the HKMA register. The CPT guidelines apply to them in the same way: 10 hours for relevant individuals, 12 for executive officers, and it is the HKMA that can ask for the evidence.

The new-joiner ethics hours count towards that year's ethics or compliance hours, but not towards the 2 extra compliance hours for responsible officers and executive officers, and not towards CPT needed for a conditional exemption from a paper. The SFC or HKMA can also set a higher CPT requirement in some cases, for example when someone is exempted from an exam requirement.

Records and the annual confirmation

Keep evidence of your CPT, such as attendance certificates and exam results, for at least three years. The SFC, or the HKMA for bank staff, can ask to see it. Licensed corporations, responsible officers and representatives confirm compliance with the CPT requirements for the previous calendar year, or explain why not, when they file their annual return online.

Firms are primarily responsible for planning the training, but meeting the hours is your problem too. Falling short casts doubt on whether you remain fit and proper and can lead to disciplinary action by the SFC or HKMA, though the regulators say they take a pragmatic view of the circumstances.

Key point: 10 hours a year, 5 of them relevant to your regulated activities, and keep the evidence for three years.

"Extra CPT" before you apply

CPT can matter before you are licensed too. Under the SFC's Guidelines on Competence, some applicants can use "Extra CPT" instead of a practical paper such as Papers 7 and 8. It means 5 CPT hours for each regulated activity you apply for, a one-off, taken within the six months before the application. Some conditional exemptions carry the same 5 extra hours. See Paper 1 exemptions and which papers you need.

If you have not applied for the licence yet, start with how to apply for an SFC licence.