Strong Principles

Over the last couple of years life has been changing for everyone in financial services, and the programme of change will only get busier.

The FSA's recent Conduct of Business rule changes, at the same time as the introduction of MiFID, have had all of us focusing on what we need to do to meet the 1 November deadline. The detailed review undertaken has resulted in a number of changes to systems, literature and internal processes.

The bigger changes will come over the next few years from the implementation of principles based regulation and the outcome of the Retail Distribution Review.

Regulations based upon principles are not new; we are already familiar with the Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) initiative. It is evident that we must focus more on 'outcomes' than processes and it is becoming increasingly important to have good management information to confidently assess how we are improving.

We are starting to understand what these changes might mean for our business. I am sure in certain areas it will give us the opportunity to be more innovative, more competitive and to streamline processes to improve our services. We also need to work on how we embed it within our current strategy culture and change programmes.

The focus on TCF over the last couple of years has challenged all of us to think about what 'fair' means for our clients It's a process that has given us insight to the approach we need to take to make the most of the wider principles based approach.

The changes apply to both product providers and advisers - and it is critical we work closely together to further improve the services we offer to our customers. Over time, the principles will drive changes to marketing literature and the information we provide - and we will engage with clients to ensure we are doing this in the most effective way.