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.
