FSA pulls bank advisers under approved persons regime

Everyone should be accountable..

This should have been done some time ago. Fed up hearing and seeing poor advice given in branches where the product rate has been used as the reason for sale, not the right product. If everyone is accountable, perhaps everyone will think again about what they are advising. Perhaps some banks will look to reduce the mortgages sold through their branches as costs will increase to manage approved persons. Could this signal the start of the end of dual pricing? Hope so...

Posted by: Justin

Customer Protection

One of the major problems with the banks is that some advisers will sell as much as they can for a couple of years and leave before the problems they have created come back to bite them. This may help to solve this problem but, as always, the devil is in the detail.

Posted by: Suhan Srinivasan

Will management be accountable too???

Great news that "sales" staff will be accountable - hopefully that will transend down to the Sales Managers that set ludicrous targets - then bully staff for not achieving

Posted by: Bob

Completely agree

At last a sensible decision made by the soon-to-be-absolished FSA! Why they have let these so-called advisors continue to offer so-called advice for this long without being approved is staggering. As an approved person, it really frustates me when bank/building society staff try to persuade me to meet with one of their so-called advisors who are less experienced and less qualified than me. They are merely sales people NOT advisors but if they want to masquerade as advisors they should obtain the revelant qualifications and be able to prove they have done so via FSA approval

Posted by: Carl

Completely agree

At last a sensible decision made by the soon-to-be-absolished FSA! Why they have let these so-called advisors continue to offer so-called advice for this long without being approved is staggering. As an approved person, it really frustates me when bank/building society staff try to persuade me to meet with one of their so-called advisors who are less experienced and less qualified than me. They are merely sales people NOT advisors but if they want to masquerade as advisors they should obtain the revelant qualifications and be able to prove they have done so via FSA approval

Posted by: Carl

FSA - Bank advisers

Again I completely agree - considering the majority of claims made to the FOS relate to Banks and Bank Advice why has it taken so long for this to happen - oh dear silly me - I forgot the banks appear to have pulled the FSA strings in the past. Lets hope this is an indiation of change for the benefit of us all and most importantly the customer who is so often exploited by the banks!

Posted by: Ged

Well Done FSA

Well done Lesley Titcombe and the FSA, perhaps you are listening now after all. I am particulalry pleased to note that they will require recordings of all arrears telephone calls. This needs to go further in that; 1. Three years is not long enough for maintaining phone recordings, it should be a minimum of 6 years and all the time the F-pack refuse to respect the 15 year longstop, it should firms should look to keep recordings indefinately as they take up no pyhsical space, just memory on a PC. 2. All sales meetings shoudl be recorded (and if you are an adviser, don't forget you may have been recorded by the consumer who can then pick and chosoe whetehr to use a recording or deny all knowledge of it existing based on what suits them.... Wake up and realise it is not just dodgy advisers out there, it is also dodgy provdiers and clients.

Posted by: Phil Castle

Step in which direction

Superficially this seems to be a step in the right direction, having every person providing advice regulated. But this can only be done with another uplift in staff to cover the administration. Wouldn’t have been saner and more cost effective to regulate the institution. I suspect that mortgage advisers in a bank are transitory, doing their time in particular departments. So the turnover will probably be higher than a mortgage brokerage. Okay, so that justifies taking on another 50 staff at Canary Wharf. But does it achieve much. Major institutions are generally run on the basis of business targets, and these, and their associated pressures, are unlikely to diminish - so turnover in the mortgage depart is likely to increase. Oh well, let's raise that to 100 additional staff at the Wharf. And just what are the Compliance Departments in these organisations doing if non-compliance is as high as the FSA indicate. Buckling to the demands of higher management? If that is the case then the FSA should be concentrating their efforts on the institution management of advice, rather than the individual advisers, who could be under invidious pressure. It would be more cost effective, especially if the staff in those departments are only likely to have a short life in lending. And, just what is the non-compliance rate of banks. Certainly they generate a larger level of complaints than brokers, but they also handle a larger volume of business, and in a different manner. Taking absolute figures without including their context is likely to give a false impression - which also may be what the FSA want, since it them allows them to boost their own powers. A central plank of FSA regulation is transparency. Unfortunately, its not a central plank of their own culture.

Posted by: Glen McKeown

Bankers

I would suggest it's not the advisers fault but the sales targets imposed upon the staff - they are forced into making sales not in the best interest of a client. I am just looking at rebroking some busines protection written by a lending manager of a bank to cover £70k biz loan for 15 years on a joint life basis with accident & sickness included - for a cost of £19,387.26 which was added to the loan.

Posted by: Steve S