Treating Customer’s Fairly on Speed? Well with the FCA final implementation rules upon us, the MiFID II requirements are intended to increase disclosure to clients, provide transparency around execution arrangements and order routing decisions, and should facilitate greater investor challenge and scrutiny by clients on the performance of firms acting on their behalf.
The FCA have been busy: there is the HMT/FAMR latest on definition of advice, the Suitability Review report, the latest on Defined Benefit Pension transfers. Elsewhere we have MiFID II implementation guidance, AML and General data Protection Regime - GDPR initiatives.
The Financial Conduct Authority recently released Assessing Suitability Review looked into the suitability of the advice offered by the pensions and investment market, and the quality of disclosure in the sector.
One thing is clear, there is real momentum underway within the retail investment advice market towards more client-centric business models that will make both products and services easy to access, affordable and compliant.
Model Office’s (MO’s) aim is to ensure compliance is no longer considered as a department or business function but rather a corporate state of mind.
We have a new duck in town, HMT have now placed their stake in the MiFID advice definition camp and thus we now have a clear and transparent definition when advice is advice and not as the case maybe.
Benchmarking professional development within the retail financial service industry means calibrating the FCA directives within Model Office’s (MOs) algorithm. In our blog FCA project Innovate, regulatory resources and RegTech development we detailed some of the FCA papers that MO’s algorithm assesses and incorporates into the regulatory and business development benchmarking.
The problem with regulatory compliance and business development is it’s a bit like hurdling in the dark: you just don’t know if your strategy will protect against the constant stream of regulatory directives, compliance costs and market risks.