The Model Office Blog

Introducing MO's dynamic behavioural steers

Given our interest in Behavioural Economics (BE) and the FCA’s usage of BE in gaining consumer engagement in their financial affairs we wanted to ensure Model Office – MO would not leave firms who have taken the diagnostic assessment scratching their heads about improving their benchmarked scores across the 5 performance keys and the overall results dashboard.

With the introduction of project innovate and its Sandbox and safe harbour for firms wanting to stress test their offerings against the rules, we wanted to encourage firms to ask the questions ‘So what’ and ‘what’s next’ and provide nudges or steers that showcase good practice in the industry and provide resources such as key strategies and FCA suitability directives, final guidance and discussion paper good practice examples that will give participant firms good context to take action and improve their scoring and compliance, business/people development strategies.

Each Key has between 5-11 business functions and each business function has a minimum of 9 steering strategies for MO’s algorithm to choose from to improve scores, with MO’s full platform offering over 450 steers across all 5 keys.

For example in Your Promise key for the business function ‘Research Tools’, if a firm scores low in this area then the following steers are provided:

1. Ensure that research tools provide suitable and relevant information for individual client needs and support robust systems and controls (e.g. file reviews, assessing recommendations –TR16/1)
2. Research tools provide data that is based on client not product/platform needs, i.e. guard against maintaining status quo bias (TR16/1)
3. Research tools cover all services providing excellent Research & Due Diligence (e.g. investments, risk, retirement, protection, mortgage and estate planning tools)

With the addition of the bespoke steers, MO acts as a guidance platform to help improve firm’s compliance, business and people development.