Having just read the Money Management story on the views of Mr Fisher at Towry Law, I find he has succeeded in creating a huge dichotomy for me. On one hand I want to comment on the utter rubbish he is spouting, but on the other I don’t really wish to give his comments the time of day.
However, I think that the balance has swung in favour of replying to the uninformed comments he has thrown around, which damage the reputation of our industry, criticise the regulator and annoy many hard-working advisers who have just gone through the biggest change this industry has ever seen.
The figures mentioned by Mr Fisher of “1,500 advisers giving advice out of 25,000 salesmen” have no substance to them and are insulting to the profession as a whole. Given the extensive change the sector is going through at the moment, I find these comments as insulting as they are ridiculous. Advisers are working hard to operate within the new rules and they don’t need a prominent industry spokesman sitting on the sidelines, making figures up for the point of being controversial.
Turning to Mr Fisher’s suggested ban on commission for protection, this just highlights that he is thinking purely about himself and not about consumers, advisers or the protection gap that exists within society.
Protection is not something the vast majority of the public want to spend money on and neither is it something that most people will do without prompting or being ‘sold to’. This is why commission works perfectly well for this market and why there is no evidence of mis-selling based on commission. In fact, every adviser I have ever met has advised on the basis of client needs and lower premiums. This is why protection sales are more biased towards lower premiums than they are higher commissions.
Finally, I am not sure how Mr Fisher arrived at the conclusion that only 1,500 advisers give advice and that the rest only get paid once a product is recommended. At SimplyBiz we support around 5,500 advisers from 2,000 firms and having gone through an extensive period of checking client agreements, I can categorically state that nearly all of these include an explicit charge for advice, regardless of whether or not a product is brought.
Given the changes our profession is going through and the new ways in which advisers are being asked to operate, I find Mr Fisher’s comments ill-timed at best and insulting at worst. This is a time when organisations and providers should be supporting the adviser community and not taking every opportunity to bash the sector. I am sure that the regulator understands the need for stability in our profession and I would like to see the RDR bed in properly before commentators like Mr Fisher decide that it is time to stick yet another boot in and suggest even more costly changes are adopted.
Matt Timmins is joint managing director at SimplyBiz
