FCA Probes UK Advisors On Consumer Duty Progress

Tom Burroughes

16 February 2024

The , said. “I’m sure we can all agree that everyone who provides an ongoing professional and valuable service deserves to be paid a fair price for it. So, we must also all agree that no customer should be paying an ongoing service charge where no ongoing service is being delivered.”

"Good advisors in well run advice firms have nothing to fear directly here, other than additional costs associated with increased evidence gathering,” he continued.

“However, there are shades of Australia’s Royal Commission in this where they uncovered misconduct relating to financial institutions charging customers for services that were not provided and, in some cases, that were never intended to be provided. The fallout from that Royal Commission in Australia has been seismic and industry redefining, with many large established institutions going to the wall and banks withdrawing from advice services,” he said. (Polson referred to the Commission’s report, in 2019, into widespread mis-selling and other poor practices in the Australian bank and wealth sectors. See a story here from 2018.)

“If the FCA is intent on going down a similar path, the ramifications here could be equally significant with a real risk of the good firms being tarred with the brush rightly applied to the bad actors,” Poulson added.