Does your employer pay for your CISI exams?

If you have just joined a UK bank's graduate scheme and been told you are sitting Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment (CISI) exams in a few weeks, the honest first question is not how to study. It is whether you need to spend any of your own money at all. Often you do not. Sometimes you very much do, and the reason is narrower than people expect.

The short version. Most UK employers that require CISI exams pay the exam fee and supply the official workbook, because on several qualifications the workbook is bundled into the booking anyway. What they supply far less often is volume of practice questions, and that is the thing that actually moves a pass mark. Before buying anything, find out exactly what your firm gives you.

What you are probably being asked to sit

The usual requirement on a UK capital-markets graduate scheme is the CISI Capital Markets Programme. People call it "the FCA exams" or "Units 1 and 2", which is why it can be hard to search for. It is two units:

Unit	What it is
Regulatory unit	UK Financial Regulation
Technical unit	Securities, or Derivatives — you sit whichever matches the desk

Pass both and you hold an Ofqual Level 3 Certificate in Securities, or in Derivatives, depending on the technical unit taken. You also become eligible for Associate membership of CISI and the letters ACSI after your name.

One thing that catches people out. In the UK, Ireland, Europe and North America you must pass IntegrityMatters — an online integrity assessment — before you can sit the Capital Markets Programme exams. It is a prerequisite, not a formality to do afterwards, and discovering it the week of your exam is an avoidable problem.

What employers usually cover, and what they usually do not

Usually covered	Often not covered
The exam fee for a first attempt	The fee for a resit, which is charged in full
The official CISI workbook — on several qualifications it is purchased as part of booking the exam	A large question bank, as opposed to the handful of sample questions in the workbook
Sometimes a training-provider course	Study leave worth the name, once you are on the desk

Note the asymmetry. The things an employer funds are the things with an invoice attached. The thing that most reliably gets people through a multiple-choice regulatory exam — working through enough questions to recognise the patterns and the traps — has no invoice, so it is the thing most often left to you.

When buying your own practice is a waste of money

Genuinely, these cases exist, and we would rather say so:

Your firm has bought you a full provider course that includes a question bank. Use it. A second bank is redundant.
You have months, not weeks, and you learn well from reading. The official workbook is thorough. It is dense and badly suited to being read like a novel, but it is complete.
Your firm runs internal mocks and will tell you where you stand before the real thing. That feedback loop is the expensive part, and you already have it.

When it is worth your own money

You have a short deadline. Four weeks from starting on a desk is a common requirement, and desk work does not pause for it.
You got a workbook and nothing else. A workbook tells you what is true. It does not tell you whether you can recognise it in the wording an examiner uses.
A resit comes out of your pocket. Then the cost of practice is small against the cost of failing.
You do not know which chapters carry the marks. Regulatory syllabuses are not weighted evenly, and revising them evenly is the most common way to run out of time.

Being straight about what we sell

We do not sell preparation for the Capital Markets Programme. If UK Financial Regulation and the Securities or Derivatives unit are what you have been told to sit, nothing on this site is the right purchase for you, and the honest advice is to use what your employer gives you plus CISI's own materials.

What we do cover are the CISI exams people tend to meet later — once a role, a regulator or a move abroad asks for something specific. Global Financial Compliance and Combating Financial Crime for compliance work, Risk in Financial Services for risk, Corporate Finance Regulation for deal-side compliance, UAE Financial Rules and Regulations if you move to the Gulf. Those are usually not employer-bundled in the same way, and are more often bought by the candidate.

Three questions to ask your firm this week

Which exact units am I booked for, and by when? "The FCA exams" is not an answer you can study from.
What am I being given — fee only, or fee plus workbook plus a course?
Who pays for a resit? This changes the maths on everything above, and it is a fair question to ask before you need the answer.

If your exam is one we cover, every bank on this site includes chapter walkthroughs, a printable cram sheet and mock exams weighted to the real paper rather than spread evenly. Compare all nine CISI exams, or start with the free study plans — they show you which chapters carry the marks whether or not you ever buy anything.

Programme structure and prerequisites above were checked in November 2026 against CISI and training-provider material. Employer policies vary widely and change; treat everything here about what firms fund as a guide to what to ask, not as a description of your own contract.