A recent survey by Schroders revealed that 25 per cent of advisers thought the consumer duty would have an above medium impact on their business, while 39 per cent said it would have no impact at all.
Speaking on the latest FTAdviser podcast, Alexandra Roberts, head of regulatory policy and compliance at Pimfa, said the fact some advisers feel the consumer duty will have no impact on their business is quite worrying.
“The consumer duty is a flagship piece of regulation from the Financial Conduct Authority and if you listen to all the communications and messaging that the FCA has provided over the past six months, they want firms to take it seriously,” she said.
“They believe that it will have a big impact on the way that customers are treated and ultimately on customer outcomes.”
Meanwhile Gillian Hepburn, head of UK intermediary solutions at Schroders, said others are seeing an impact because of the amount of resources that it's taking some of them to actually get to the point of implementation.
“But it's not just about that,” she said.
“It's about the ongoing compliance with the consumer duty and then secondly, perhaps once they've gone through a fair value assessments, for example, or looked at consumer understanding, how much resource it then takes to implement some of the changes that they've identified.”
She explained that it was great that some advisers were “seizing the opportunity” to sit back and review their business and really think about customers.
Elsewhere, a survey by Aviva back in March revealed that 84 per cent of those advisers surveyed said they considered the duty to be treating customers fairly - a re-positioning or a readjustment of existing regulatory expectations.
“That seriously underestimates the impact that the consumer duty will have on businesses,” Roberts said.
“That's a dangerous route to take, especially considering how seriously the FCA is taking it.
“Consumer duty will have a very big impact on their business and firms that are sort of avoiding that and not realising that are approaching it in the wrong way.”
sonia.rach@ft.com