The FCA confirmed some important new appointments this week which suggest that it will be trying to take a tougher line with enforcement in future.
With every sign that financial scams and financial crime are growing at an unprecedented and troubling rate, the watchdog has decided it’s time to act.
It has a mountain to climb.
To beef up its enforcement team the regulator is replacing current director of enforcement Mark Steward, who is leaving shortly, with not one but two joint executive directors of enforcement.
My simple maths tells me this is a doubling of the enforcement leadership team which, at the very least, is a significant investment as executive directors do not come cheap.
The two replacements for the appropriately named Mr Steward are the, almost as appropriately named, Steve Smart and Therese Chambers.
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Mr Smart had a long career at the National Crime Agency and Ms Chambers is an FCA veteran with over 20 years at the watchdog. They are not rookies.
The FCA has also promised to strengthen its enforcement team more generally ahead of the imminent launch of its much-vaunted new Consumer Duty regulations.
So far so good and I wish the new executive leads the best of luck – they will need it.
Because the fact is, while we wait to see how the Consumer Duty will be implemented – nothing fundamentally has changed. Even the eagerly awaited Online Safety Bill, which promises to help tackle online scams, remains stuck in the House of Commons after a year of being knocked around.
Without the bill, and other new legislation, the fundamental fact remains that in the UK we regulate the adviser, not the product. Enforcement is, mostly, a retrospective task, shutting the gate after the horse has bolted.
There is virtually no pre-vetting of products in the UK and that’s not likely to change. Many consider it an almost impossible task in any event to pre-vet products. I’m not sure I agree with that but it would be a massive task, at the least.
The fact, thoguh, is that pre-vetting of products is probably the only way to massively cut down on financial crime.
If all products were assessed by the FCA for ‘financial safety’ in the same way as cars are checked for road safety before being unleashed on the public we would have a genuinely pro-active regulator which intervened early enough to make a difference.
This is in contrast to the current arrangement whereby the criminals have already flogged their dodgy products and got away with the loot before the regulator even has a clue what’s happened in most cases. Every month I read dozens of enforcement case details and it’s overwhelmingly clear it takes a huge amount of time to spot a financial criminal, often years.
Unless this key issue is tackled the FCA could quadruple the size of its enforcement team and it would still only be scratching the surface of the problem. If it is to make a real difference fundamental reform of enforcement is necessary and that means much earlier intervention.
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Kevin O’Donnell is editor of Financial Planning Today and has worked as a journalist and editor for over three decades.
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