Fair Value
Stuart Ritchie, managing partner at GSB Wealth believed ensuring fair value appeared to remain a key challenge.
He said: “While many firms have updated their fee structures. comprehensive data and evaluations are essential to demonstrate the true value to consumers, beyond mere market benchmarking."
One of Progeny’s responses around delivering fair value was to establish a client value proposition committee which aims to drive betterment for clients via a data-led approach.
Hawkesley explained: “The committee can quickly identify issues or trends, drive continual improvement and help evidence value. This will be further strengthened by the appointment of a new head of client value proposition.
“A further new role is a dedicated head of our investment committee, whose ongoing responsibility is to present oversight and challenge in relation to our centralised investment proposition.
“We’re also further defining our proposition, via a number of proposition workshops, to ensure we’re focusing on the areas that deliver the most value for clients.
“We also invested in a major project with Alpha Financial Markets Consulting, to review all client processes, technology and policy and see where efficiencies or changes could be made. This has given us so much valuable insight and is helping to ensure that the business continues to evolve to be as productive, efficient and client-centric as possible.”
On the use of data, Emma Napier, consulting director at NextWealth, said: “Each year we conduct a report on consolidators and aggregators and early indicators are seeing some definite changing patterns in terms of the due diligence from both buyer and seller related to consumer duty implications.
“Intellectually mining the data needed for all realms of consumer duty report is and remains challenging for advice businesses.”
For Tean Hatt, IFA at Vizion Wealth, he said it was great to see some firms “finally” being held to account for lack of ongoing service.
“The changes we have made have definitely benefited our clients and allow us to better understand their views on the services and value being provided.
“We have always provided regular reviews and have a robust system for documenting these. It is clear from industry press and new clients that some people have not benefited from these in the past, despite paying an ongoing fee so it’s great to see some firms finally being held to account for lack of ongoing service,” he added.
Advice Gap
On the advice gap, Hatt also said: “I know that for some firms the impact and costs involved of implementing consumer duty has meant they have dis-engaged with some less wealthy clients and that is a shame although understandable because the industry needs to maintain healthy level of profitability to ensure it continues to thrive and grow.
