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.
Launched with plenty of fanfare, the FCA’s project innovate has its Sandbox live with 24 accepted participants playing in its regulatory safe harbour and testing innovative services, products and business models in a live environment. The FCA TechSprint initiative is also live where app developers meet and are challenged over two days to create a prototype technology for streamlining business operations and regulatory reporting.
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With all this creativity in play, when we were asked into the FCA to ‘kick the tires’ around the sandbox, we thought that the regulator should walk its talk and create a digital diagnostic platform that allows firms to see if they are hitting the regulatory bases and also assess how they are competing in a highly competitive market. ‘Good idea’ said the FCA, ‘But’ (there’s always a but) ‘we can’t be seen to be prescriptive’.
