Retirement sales practices will come under the regulatory microscope in the New Year.
FCA technical specialist Rory Percival revealed this afternoon that the regulator will be examining this area of the sector. In early 2016 FCA officials will scrutinise non-advised sales and what the “customer journey looks like”. He said the FCA was going into this review without any preconceptions.

The scope for scams has always been there but the risk has increased significantly due to the pension reforms, he said.

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Mr Percival, speaking at the IFP annual conference, said that legacy contracts and exit charges are other areas the FCA will be looking at.

Communication with firms is an important area the FCA is working on, he said.

He said: “We want you to be clearer about our expectations so you can get on with doing a good job without being inhibited by what you think we want to do but in practice we don’t.”

He said there were three pillars of work – one has been thematic subjects which the FCA will examine and then publish findings and ideas for driving up standards.

Pillar two is reactive, if the FCA gets intelligence on a certain area, that might drive action by the regulator. The third pillar is proactively dealing with individual firms and he said that this had changed quite significantly.

He said: “The vast majority of you we will deal with you on what we call a flexible portfolio basis.”

He said it had not been worked out fully how it would work in practice.

Communication will be key next for the FCA, he said. He explained he had been recently looking at professionalism and what that meant.

Delegates were given an insight into real and emerging regulatory risks and how to be protected against these by two other experts – Mel Holman CFP^CM, director at Compliance and Training Solutions and Jamie Newell from O3 Insurance Solutions, a specialist PI broker, who gave an update on PI. He said defined benefit transfers were the new “hot potato”. There are only 4 or 5 options for Financial Planners and wealth managers in terms of insurers that they can go to for PI, he said.

Cyber cover has become a new feature to protect against hacking, he explained.