Advisers are to be hit with a five per cent rise in regulatory fees from the FCA. FtAdviser gives a breakdown of the costs but advisers may be cynical about the rationale.
IFAs will collectively be expected to pay £86.5m in 2022/23 with a total of £640.1m to be paid by the whole industry.
The FCA puts this change in funding requirements down to a mixture of ongoing regulatory activities (£611.3m) - the baseline cost of running the FCA, as well as new responsibilities (£3m), scope changes (£10.4m), and the National Insurance rate increases (£3.1m).
Advisers will, of course, have their own views about whether such costs are justified, if they should be paying for changes in the scope of the FCA and indeed general inflation.
On the subject of inflation, Adam Leci, technical consultant at Prestwood Software, suggests taking a calm approach to inflation projections with clients.
He says it is likely advisers are struggling to justify to clients that it's appropriate to use an inflation figure of 3% when inflation is sitting at nearly three times that mark and suggests way in which they might do so.
It is a useful article with lots of graphs.
Andy Bell of AJ Bell fame gives his view on private equity in the platform market.
“Private equity goes where the sex and violence is. And that’s what we are seeing here. The platform market is where it is at. So I take that as great; we are in the right spot.
“I don’t have a particular view on private equity in the sense that, are they a good owner or a bad owner? If you believe that stability of ownership is important then clearly it would be a negative,” he says.
RLAM’s Trevor Greetham suggests a broader diversification to help investors cope with inflation.
FTAdviser takes a long look at what it calls the ticking insolvency time bomb for UK consumers.
Advisers say that some clients are asking about the status of protection insurance policies should they be called up to the armed forces in the event of a conflict. This does seem somewhat theoretical for now, but it is interesting that advisers are picking up on these concerns among the public.
