The FCA’s consumer duty is not finished and other versions will emerge which are more closely aligned with technology and artificial intelligence, according to advisers.
Speaking on the FT Adviser podcast, Victor Sacks, IFA at VS Associates, said he initially saw consumer duty as an opportunity to explore what he was offering to clients and what he could improve on.
But a year on from the FCA’s flagship rules, Sacks said the work was not over because other versions of the consumer duty would emerge.
He said: “I don't think consumer duty will ever be done, we will just see various different versions.
“Going forward, as the FCA gets to understand what we do, they'll get to understand how we are, and they'll understand they'll take us down a road that they want to go down, constantly asking us to check and rebalance and check and rebalance as we go forward.”
Mark Pittaccio, business consultant and behavioural economist at Quilter Financial Planning, said the rules meant advice firms now have more chance of getting into trouble for what they don't do when they're not advising.
He said: “Consumer duty has really brought to the fore that record keeping, all the things you do when you're not in front of the client, making sure that those annual reviews are done and everything is documented correctly.
“It's all those things that you don't do when you're not in front of the client that's really important.”
Meanwhile, Dan Scholey, COO of Moneyhub, hoped to see interesting propositions come to market post-consumer duty.
“At the moment, it's predominantly on how do they position products and services to consumers, or offer advice to consumers.
"But where it'll get really exciting is where we start seeing new products and services come to market, because with data we can now hyper segment people to give individual propositions.
“We're going to see some really quite exciting propositions come to market in the next few years that just would not have been possible prior to this obsession with treating the customer fairly and using their data to do that.”
To hear more about how advisers have implemented consumer duty and what lies ahead, click on the link above.
amy.austin@ft.com
