The chair of the Treasury select committee Harriet Baldwin has proposed a new personalised financial guidance regime in an amendment to the Financial Services and Markets bill.
The new rules would allow any financial services firm, including insurers, asset managers and advisers, to market tailored investments or products to clients without stepping into advice.
It will be interesting to see if this provokes further debate and most importantly the stance taken by the Treasury itself. Baldwin is a former Treasury minister but is now, of course, in a role scrutinising its activities.
It is clear that many more people need help especially given cost pressures, market turmoil and, arguably pension freedoms where the outcomes achieved by the non-advised may not have been optimal to say the least.
The problem has always been potential liabilities for the guidance and, to a degree, how to charge. It will be interesting to see if the debate moves on or faces the same hurdles. Tailored investments also carries distant echoes of stakeholder products.
And where do advisers stand on the issue? Some advisers have always had reservations about how providers might deliver such guidance.
In other news, the advice industry would benefit from helping paraplanners develop specialisms in their fields argues Kate Morris, winner of CISI’s paraplanner of the year award.
Writing in Money Marketing, Neil Liversidge suggests that networks have had their day. There’s a lot of interesting stuff about DBS in here.
Labour MPs are attempting to prevent the government from scrapping retained EU laws that protect parts of the compensation framework that make up the Pension Protection Fund.
The set of measures announced in the Autumn Statement this month by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will not prevent the Bank of England from hiking rates further, according to deputy governor Dave Ramsden.
