Blog: Is it any wonder Gay quit the Impossible Job?

Understatement coming up: Stephen Gay was not universally welcomed as the director-general of the Association of IFAs (AIFA).

After announcing his resignation from the organisation today, the consensus seems to be that he will not be missed either.

It's only been 14 months after all and, according to many advisers, all Gay managed to achieve was to confine to the scrapheap the very agenda on which AIFA was founded: an organisation looking out for the interests of 'independent' advisers.

I am of course referring to AIFA's decision, in July last year, to permit 'restricted' (tied/multi-tied in today's parlance) advisers as members.

But wasn't the organisation right to do it? AIFA reasoned that, as many of its existing, independent members would become 'restricted' under new rules to be introduced at the end of the year, it wouldn't be right to bar them all of a sudden.

From a financial viewpoint, restricting membership to this new category of IFA made little sense either; the trade body is already cash poor and, in the 12 months to June last year, recorded a deficit approaching £200,000.

But criticism of Gay began long before this decision was made. On the day he joined AIFA (from Aviva - this is important), he was immediately dismissed as the wrong man for the job.

Here's a small selection of what some advisers had to say...

"AIFA has been dying a slow death for a while, this is only likely to hasten matters."

"In my opinion the man was extremely pro RDR and keen on doing his best for Aviva. How he got this position is anybody's guess."

"Has Mr Gay IFA experience? Can I pretend to know what it's like to live on the front line just because I've watched a film about it? I don't believe one can?"

This final remark was a key theme at the time. In a similar vein to football fans' view that the England team should have an English manager, a number of advisers appear to believe that only an existing or former client-facing IFA is capable of representing their interests.

In one sense, Gay failed. He failed to win over the naysayers and turn around an organisation scraping by on the shrinking number of membership fees it was collecting.

But in another, he took on what was at the time, and remains, the Impossible Job.

The alternative view...

Stephen Gay got a better offer.

Scott Sinclair is editor of IFAonline and Professional Adviser magazine.