9th October 2017

Back to the future

Another major brand has announced that it is about to increase its financial planning operation with a hire of some 30 new advisers and another 70 next years. A sure sign that the 2017 advice gap provided both opportunity and a solution to dealing with the thousands of disenfranchised customers of major, highly reputable brands who have to find a way to service former IFA clients who no longer have an IFA, having fallen victim (if that is the right word) to IFA segmentation since RDR.

In 2011 I noted there was growing concern about what consumer reaction would be to what has now been done in their name by the then regulator, the FSA.

I observed that as there were only so many high-net worth clients out there, what will happen to the mass market advice model, and asked what will happen to the “orphan clients”? Will we see the return of the “Man from the Pru” and provider ‘sales’ forces?

It would seem I was right some six years later. 

Trade press of 4^th March 2010 alerted readers to a then quite astonishing admission by the FSA’s then Head of Investment Policy Peter Smith.

It reported that when speaking at a Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment Private Wealth Management Conference in London, he spoke about the potential for consumers rejecting the big idea about adviser charging and confessed, "If consumers still do not want to engage with it then we probably will have to do something else.”

This really beggars belief. The various discussion and consultation documents have thrown up numerous proposals, many of which have been dropped, reformed or deformed and it is absolutely clear that much RDR directional thinking had been navigation at sea with only a world atlas to chart the way- something that will give a general idea of what landmass is where but zero detail about the hazards presented by the ocean the vessel is travelling on.

This may be acceptable behaviour in regulation-world but let’s not forget that it is the advisers and consumers whose boats would be heading for the rocks.

It was clear in 2010 that the regulator failed to understand the psychology of adviser/client interaction. In 2011 it was the same but it has no intention of listening to the responses from experienced industry navigation professionals, providers, lawyers, MPs, trade bodies and of course advisers. 

Not content with being the body that was asleep at the helm when Northern Rock slammed into the rocks followed by the rest of the UK banking “Armada” it seems the FSA also wanted to be remembered as the quango responsible for the decimation of retail financial services. 

With all this in mind, perhaps we should look back to 17^th June 1999 and the Commons 1^st reading of the FSMA 2000 bill and ask the question, why does nobody in regulation ever learn from it’s past mistakes.

The transcript of this debate from 1999 highlighted  so many issues of concern that were expressed then with the seemingly strange phenomenon in the regulatory world of foresight!

Nobody listened then and I am reminded of the quote from the late Bob Monkhouse when thinking about the impact of poorly thought out regulation upon the consumer of tomorrow “They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now”.

The industry is not laughing now, neither was the mass-market consumer after the 1^st January 2013.

Regulation, Panacea Comment