Treating Customers Fairly

Life is never boring in the financial world, although most of the excitement has been of the negative variety recently. Therefore after a difficult year, it was great to get some good news for a change in June. 

Firstly, as referred to elsewhere on this site, we did extremely well in a “mystery shopper” exercise. My colleague Ruth showing the importance that we place on client care. However it was even more important that we survived the scrutiny of our regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA).  All smaller advisory firms in the country will, at some point, have to meet up with the FSA to discuss with them, whether they are “treating customers fairly” (TCF). This was a major initiative that was rolled out by the FSA some 2 years ago. All firms were to have implemented certain procedures by now. Our appointment was two days after I returned from holiday, on 16 June.

Well like most firms, our first reaction was on hearing about TCF was: “of course we are treating our customers fairly!”  This would then be followed by: “have they nothing better to do than think up new acronyms to beat us around the head with”. 

However we soon realised that, what originally seemed like an imposition from a Regulator, who clearly didn’t understand us, was actually good sense. It gave us the opportunity to review all of our processes, to check that we were offering a modern and efficient service to our clients.  Needless to say, however good you may think you are, there are always a number of things you can improve. We have used the process to bring our review services in particular up-to-date, and most our clients will see the benefits of this through their better quality and more informative reviews this year.

I am glad to say that our meeting with the FSA went extremely well, and they were impressed that our systems and our open communication with our clients clearly demonstrated that we treat customers fairly.   Although you may think and hope that you are doing a good job it is always nice when it is officially ratified.  Even so we must not stand still as we look to constantly improve the service we offer to our clients.

In future in this blog I will perhaps look at economic news and generally things that may help people achieve an insight into what happens within a department like this. In fact it could be about anything that I feel will interest people.

For more information please contact Simon Ludden, Financial Planning Manager at Furley Page Solicitors.