Other advisers were more sceptical of the announcement.
“Whilst, in theory, this is great news, the reputation of dedicated hard-working professionals has been tarnished enough by scammers using cold-call techniques, it is simply another rule,” Scott Taylor-Barr, a financial adviser at Carl Summers Financial Services said.
“These sorts of people don't follow the existing rules in the main, so why is this one suddenly going to be any different?
“There are rules governing social media posts, but a quick trawl of any social media platform will bring up dozens of ads and posts that don't comply. We are not suffering from a lack of rules to tackle poor and illegal practices, we are suffering from a lack of robust enforcement of those rules.”
Rachael Griffin, a tax and financial planning expert at Quilter said: “This is a good move from the government that should help fight fraud. However, the unintended consequence of this may be that it pushes more fraud online, a place already teeming with dubious and downright fraudulent financial propositions.
"It is therefore more important than ever that the government gets on with enacting the Online Safety Bill so that people can be better protected online and also safer from cold calls.”
'A scourge on society'
Meanwhile, providers welcomed the extension of the cold calling ban, which already applies to pensions.
Steven Cameron, pensions director at Aegon, said: "Scammers are a scourge of today’s society, often tricking people out of savings they’ve spent a lifetime building up.
"Government, regulators and financial services firms all need to work together to do everything possible to protect our customers. The scammers put huge efforts into finding new ‘creative’ ways of tricking people and just as much effort needs to be put into finding ways of keeping customers safe. It’s an ever evolving picture but a blanket ban on cold calling is a good start.”
Likewise, Tom Selby, head of retirement policy at AJ Bell, said financial scams are a "scourge on society and ruin lives", so any move to protect more consumers from different types of fraud is extremely welcome.
Selby said governments cannot stop scams altogether, but they can place significant barriers in the way of those intent on committing fraud.
“According to UK Finance, an estimated £1.3bn was stolen through financial fraud in 2021," he said. "These scams will often begin with an unsolicited approach from someone via phone, text message, email or on social media.
“For this cold-calling crackdown to work we need two things: tightly worded legislation, to ensure nefarious contacts are specifically targeted, and a legitimate threat of enforcement where someone breaks the new rules. The plans also need to go hand-in-hand with greater responsibility being taken by internet giants like Google for paid-for scam adverts, something which the online safety bill can hopefully bring into UK legislation."
