Keeping your promises

We all know that the FSA is hoping to shake up the way financial advice is disseminated to the largely disenchanted public, to make it simpler and less scary for people to access good quality advice from well-qualified professionals and agree on how and by how much this service will be remunerated.

No-one in their right mind and operating within the law and good practice could fault this ambition but whether the FSA - which brought us depolarisation and the consumer-baffling jargon tied, multi-tied and whole of market a mere three years ago - can deliver and be fair to currently practising IFAs is yet to be seen.

One interesting development to date has been the tentative collaborative working of qualification providers to tackle head-on the 'alphabet soup' of financial advice qualifications. While each is closely guarding its own interests, it appears there has been a sea-change in opinion and with the retail distribution review also bringing in independent, unbiased bodies such as the Qualification and Curriculum Authority and the Financial Services Skills Council, qualification providers are less reticent to form the much fated single professional standards board.

Nick Cann, chief executive of the Institute of Financial Planning, said: "It is good to see the Qualification and Curriculum Authority coming in because that is an independent evaluation of qualifications, and the Financial Services Skills Council gives some independent validation of what we are doing. A single standards board - which is being talked about - should allow us to bring in unbiased people to look at standards and particularly discipline codes and ethics to ensure they are consistent and to oversee that they have some teeth, which brings us all together and supports what we are trying to achieve."

The Chartered Insurance Institute, which claims to have 80 per cent market share in qualification provision, recently signed the Edinburgh declaration with the Institute of Financial Planning, Securities & Investment Institute and the Chartered Institute of Bankers in Scotland agreeing to develop a higher qualification benchmark and achieve this in an agreed timeframe.

Teresa Sayers, chief executive of the FSSC, said: "It is good to see bodies which have traditionally worked in a more competitive way banding together to improve professional standards."

Sandy Scott, group chief executive of the CII, said that with the Edinburgh declaration, "the skeleton is there, it is time to flesh it out". He said: "Our work in developing responses to the RDR has focused on ways in which the industry can work together to increase professionalism, build a more confident and trusted industry as viewed by the profession and customers, and ultimately ensure there is an expanding market and increasing numbers of consumers with access to quality advice."