Australia has less than half the number of chartered financial -analysts Hong Kong does - 2500 compared with the latter's 6000 - according to the CFA Institute's chief executive and president, Paul Smith. 
That also compared with 3500 in Singapore, Mr Smith said.
"It's pathetically small and I've never really understood why," said the leader of roughly 125,000 charterholders, half of them in North America, the other half about equally distributed between Europe and Australasia.
"We all know a number of highly skilled financial services professionals coming out of Australia," Mr Smith said.
"But the way that the Australian financial market works does not seem to tend towards credentialling in the same way that some of the other developed markets do, and indeed some of the developing markets do. There are more CFAs in China than there are in Australia," he added, although China had only started seven or eight years ago and the CFA qualification required four years of work experience while studying.
In Australia, he said, there was definitely an element of experience counting rather than credentials, and the curriculum was targeted at young people coming into the profession.
"It's a foundational program. If you're a 45-year-old and you've been doing the job for 20 years, you're almost certainly not going to put yourself through the hassle of study," Mr Smith said.
He said the CFA's exam program had been going since 1963, although it wasn't so much difficult as time consuming.
"It's not a high bar," he said But he admitted only 16 per cent of applicants ended up -completing the qualification. "I would say firstly that it's an appropriate bar, which is our point, and that secondly, if businesses took the approach towards training that they should - that, say, lawyers, doctors and accountants take, - pass rates would be a lot higher than they are," he said.
"Because the financial services industry does not give time off, young people have to study for this in their spare time ... and it's a lot tougher as a result." Mr Smith said lawyers got time off to study and "in accountancy, which I did, you get a block release of seven or eight weeks at a time, (but) no -financial services business does that for their CFA -charter--holders".
"If we are to have serious pretensions towards being a profession, then we have to be serious about the training." Mr Smith was not surprised by the gradual exodus of CFAs from investment banking to funds management, saying the issue had been around for some time.
"Specifically, our training is -focused on the investment management industry," he said.
"So -investment banking per se is not a core activity, if you like."Sell-side people in investment banks tend to take the CFA because we teach a lot about -security analytics, of course, and they might want to move across the aisle at one point or another."