Browse all articles across people aspects of regulation and people development within UK financial services
Imagine you are sitting in a large auditorium waiting for a Portfolio Manager from a large Asset Management firm. He or she is coming to bestow upon you all the wisdom they have about their shiny new fund and why your entire client base should buy it.
Recently, one of our PTS clients contacted us to say that they’d just had an FCA visit – and all was good. Interestingly, the one piece of remedial action required was improving the recording and reporting of their triage process to ensure it was recorded and that it was, in fact, non-advised.
Here is an extract from CP18/07: 4.27 In our view, if triage is to be a non-advised service, it should be an educational process so that consumers can decide whether to proceed to regulated advice. Firms can achieve this by providing generic, balanced information on the advantages and disadvantages of pension transfers. 4.
There are more than four million managers working in the UK today. The majority of them never consciously chose to be managers and will have received little or no formal training for their roles. Even among those who have, as few as one in five was trained by an accredited provider.
I like to leave the writing of this article to the last minute, a little bit like the Kim-Trump summit and Brexit negotiations, as Financial Services can move and shift day on day.
A number of lenders have been quick to launch (or relaunch) Retirement Interest Only [RIO] mortgages following the recently amended definition of lifetime mortgages by the Financial Conduct Authority [FCA]. As the FCA no longer defines RIOs as lifetime mortgages lenders have been given the ‘go ahead’ to develop/re-develop such schemes.
The Senior Managers and Certification Regime(SM&CR) is currently expected to come into effect on 10 December this year for insurers. In the last couple of years dual-regulated firms involved in banking and investments have, by necessity, become well versed in the ways of SM&CR, whilst those running and influencing insurance companies have had to adapt to living with SM&CR’s somewhat eccentric cousin, the Senior Insurance Managers Regime(SIMR), which seeks to accommodate the senior management accountability requirements of Solvency II.
My business is pensions; technical pension consultancy and competence in pensions – through CPD and/or appropriate qualifications. That’s what we do at expert pensions.
In February the European Commission issued a number of public notices and letters to UK Asset Management businesses alerting them to the practical consequences of BREXIT on funds issued by banks, asset managers and insurance companies.
Buy to let investors are becoming used to attacks on their portfolios from a number of different government led actions. First, it was the treating of mortgage interest when calculating tax relief (those changes are beginning to bite as changes are phased in through to 2020).
Lifetime financial cashflow planning is now very simple. It is no longer the preserve of specialist lifestyle financial planners. It is now possible to access powerful calculations to compute a detailed financial cashflow plan of the future. It’s a simple input, with a powerful output.
How many times have I said this before? Are we on the brink of long term consumer friendly lending into retirement and equity release solutions? Sadly, a look back in time shows many false dawns, but I am optimistic for the future.
