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Well, there is a surprise – and my voice is heavy with irony here. The FSA has found that very few firms have sufficient management information in place to demonstrate that they are treating customers fairly. That is, showing that they are fulfilling the consumer outcomes set out in the FSA’s treating customers fairly regime.

The deadline for having sufficient management information in place was the end of March 2008 and the FSA published the results of its initial survey on 30 June. It cannot be an earth-shattering discovery that many firms fell short of the expected arrangements, but what is somewhat perturbing is the low number of firms meeting the standards – only 13 per cent. The FSA should be concerned about this, although it put something of a cheerful gloss on the results, saying that eight out of 10 of the sample firms should be capable of meeting the final deadline on TCF implementation in December 2008.

Of course, the FSA’s concern about management information is predicated on the belief that “what is measured is done”. In many parts of the sector this must be right. But TCF does not lend itself easily to measurement and quantification. So are standards of management information across the sector quite the right thing for the regulator to be concentrating on? Are they part of the picture or something of a displacement activity? It could be argued that trying to measure something is a way of avoiding the pain of trying to do the thing right in the first place.

The FSA will probably be comforted to see firms collect lots of detailed TCF management information because it will allow them to measure something by which they too can be judged. But is this getting into a circular argument – a lurid measuring measurement game, I wonder?

The very fact that so many firms have found this management information part of TCF difficult might suggest that the FSA could be barking up the wrong tree or at least pursuing a less than fruitful direction. Perhaps it should be emphasising other methods or routes of checking out whether the consumer outcomes are consistently being delivered. Gaining a warm cosy glow – a regulatory comfort factor – is not the best rationale for a serious policy direction.

On the same day as the TCF interim report data was released, the regulator also published its annual report for 2007-2008. This shows no backing down from its commitment to principle-based regulation. The repeated catchphrase in the annual report is “outcome” and maybe in this lies a clue to dealing with TCF management information.

You can collect any information you like but it is how this is analysed and interpreted that matters. What I suspect is that a lack of industry clarity about the consumer ‘outcomes’ intended from all this TCF activity results in a lack of clarity in devising, using and interpreting management information.

Unless we can be clearer about the outcomes desired in and express these in more concrete terms, then no amount of measurement of internal processes will improve the situation. Again, it seems, regulation is defaulting to its comfort zone of ticking boxes and measuring process that it hopes will deliver decent results. Well, unfortunately they may not.

It is much more uncomfortable for a regulator to major on outcomes rather than processes — certainly beyond the generality set out in the six consumer outcomes so far. FSA has provided indicators of outcomes and principles which firms can apply rather than get into too much detail. Being realistic, this is just the right start, especially given the complexity of possible outcomes across the sector. Perhaps they should do more of this, rather than prescribe too much more on management information.

To achieve its necessary comfort factor, the FSA could then focus more on mystery shopping as a key supervisory tool – as after all it does focus on the outcome for the consumer and is probably quite fun in a way.

However, perhaps the lesson in all this is one that is also emerging in the retail distribution review. That is the importance of quality. If this is to be a trusted and professional advice business we need quality people, quality judgement and quality management. And quality is an inside out characteristic.

We cannot invent sufficient proxies for quality, but we can identify and recognise quality outcomes. We need to move to a new level and neither carrot and stick nor any amount of clever measurement will provide a magic trick.

David Jackman is director of Resources Compliance