"I would love to be able to offer a wider service at a lower cost to clients, but it's just really hard. Things like guidance will hopefully help and I'm really interested in that area," he says.
"But at the moment, the way things are, the requirements to run a regulated file compliantly are quite heavy handed."
Moss says he would like to be able to offer full regulated advice to more people without the burden of compliance costs. The consumer duty has gone some way to addressing this, in that it has made suitability reports shorter by removing duplications, he says, adding: "More proportionality around what you need to do to get a regulated piece of work out would be good."
But he says replacement business is still problematic. He recalls a new case he did recently for a pension transfer and calls the number of documents he had to put on the file "monstrous".
"[It] ended up being over 100 documents or something that I'd uploaded to the client file, which is crazy, so the bureaucracy is still over the top," he says.
He notes that most clients would not read a key investor information document, and yet they are still part of the disclosure process.
"So I think the more extraneous sort of stuff you can strip out of the documentation side of things. That genuinely doesn't mean clients have less access to information — all of that stuff could make the whole advice process more streamlined," he says.
"But I think in the absence of that guidance you would hope will fill that gap for some clients, and I'm very up for trying to integrate a guidance process if I can."
In the meantime, Moss does pro bono work in schools and helps individuals with simple things such as understanding their pension for free.
He says: "I like doing it and it's enjoyable. It feels like a nice thing to do, just helping them understand their pension statements and that sort of thing. I'd like to think that a lot of advisers do that."
He adds that helping school-leavers deal with their student debt and holding surgeries in workplaces are some of the areas where advisers can have the most impact outside of their day-to-day jobs.
"I'd like to see a lot more employers bring that service in and pay for it as a benefit for their employees, the way they bring in wellbeing people — sort of counsellors and things like that," he says.
"I think financial planning as a paid-for add-on at work could be a really good thing for employers to do."
