I suspect our readers will see the punished firm, Pembroke Mortgage Centre (PMC) – trading as County Financial Consultants – as operating on a different planet to them.
They are quite right but I fear sadly the British public may, unfairly as it may be, lump all advisers together.
Even worse, the BSPS debacle is not over yet and more fines will likely be on the way.
If there is one useful aspect of the FCA’s Decision Notice today it is the detailed insight into the model used by PMC, a firm which seems have been driven by both greed and ineptitude, providing what a senior FCA executive called “woeful” advice. I suspect PMC was not alone in its modus operandi.
It’s worth remembering here that pension transfers remain a perfectly valid and even a valuable part of professional and holistic Financial Planning. In the right professional hands a pension transfer can give clients valuable planning options. Unfortunately in the wrong or inept hands a pension transfer is tantamount to a loaded gun in the hands of an untrained amateur.
PMC was, in effect, an amateur. Simply a pension transfer factory, using templated Suitability Reports to shovel pension transfer money almost entirely towards just one SIPP provider. It’s staggering, in hindsight, that alarm bells were not ringing all over the place.
The scale of the mis-selling was quite appalling:
• In just 18 months Pembroke’s advisers managed to transfer £123m in pension pots with an average transfer value of £293,000 (£314,000 for BSPS members)
• South Wales-based PMC earned over £2m in transfer and ongoing advices fees by advising 420 consumers on transfers
• PMC used a templated Suitability Report in nearly all cases to justify transferring 96% of pensions to the same SIPP provider
• Overall 93% of BSPS members were advised to transfer – way, way above the industry average
• The overall FSCS uphold rate in relation to PMC so far has been 88% but in 38% of cases compensation has been limited to the FSCS maximum compensation available of £85,000. Without this limit the total compensation payable to customers would have been approximately £14.6m.
The FCA has thankfully recently announced a £49m redress scheme which will help ease the pain for some BSPS members.
It does not end with Pembroke, however. The FCA has a further 30 similar cases under investigation so expect more fines and punishments.
Rebuilding consumer trust against a backdrop of this sort of epic failure of regulation will always be a huge challenge and the many decent planners, wealth managers and advisers who read this column must be in despair at reading these stories. I share your pain.
So what’s the answer? The fact is that where rich financial pickings are to be made, vultures will always swoop in but how does the industry deal with that?
The FCA has learned its lesson, to some degree, in recent years and it is wisely now turning its attention to greater scrutiny of new entrants to the sector. This should ultimately pay dividends as it is clear unwelcome numbers of greedy, inept and poor quality people have been attracted to financial services over the years. That has to stop if the BSPS saga is not to be repeated ad infinitum.
The FCA must weed out the rogues and the incompetent before they are allowed to get anywhere near a consumer. It has yet to prove it can do this.
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