Higginson: Sort out industry representation...or else

Sesame Bankhall Group chief executive George Higginson has warned the advisory community it risks having further unwanted reforms thrust upon it if it does not better represent itself.

He was speaking during a panel session at the Sesame Symposium in London today when he was asked about why providers, not advisers, tended to dominate industry debates and events.

Higginson said he thought the advice industry was poor at representing itself.

He said the advisory community needed to "come together" if it wanted to stem the flow of unwanted regulation.

"Some nutter down the road will come up with ideas we don't like" if it doesn't unite, he said.

"One of the problems we have in our industry is we don't have a joined-up body," he added. "We have the ABI that represents life providers, we've got different bodies allegedly representing advisers and we've got to stop fighting between ourselves."

"I can tell you something: one of the big bits of feedback from the FSA is ‘if you can't put your house in order, we will'."

During the session, the panellists were also asked about the transition to adviser charging and again Higginson was stark in his outlook, describing consumers as "lazy" for expecting free advice at the moment.

"I don't think we do ourselves any favours as a distribution industry. Too many people believe good advice is selling it cheaper," he said.

"You have to get to the stage where you value your advice. It will take a little bit of time because consumers have had this expectation [of free advice] for such a long time."