The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has written to 152 investment firms over providing potentially unsuitable high risk investments in the year to March.
The information was contained in the annual report and accounts published by the regulator yesterday (19 July).
The regulator’s chief executive, Andrew Bailey, stated: "We know consumers suffer harm when firms recommend they buy unsuitable products.
"This includes high risk investments that are not appropriate for consumers with lower risk appetites and those without the financial capability to cope with a significant reduction in their capital.
"In line with our consumer protection objective, our supervision in 2017 included multi-firm work to ensure we better understand the level of high risk investments recommended to retail consumers.
"We requested details on the high risk investment activity of 152 firms and analysed their responses. This work also assessed what product disclosures firms provided to consumers before investment."
Among the actions taken by the FCA in 2018 was to restrict the sale of investment products such as contracts for difference and binary options to the general consumer.
Mr Bailey also highlighted the issue of consumers receiving a poor level of service from their platform.
The paper showed investment platforms had received 15,000 complaints from customers unable to access the services due to technical issues in the past year.
Since the beginning of this year, platforms Aviva and Aegon have faced wide-ranging technical issues stemming from their replatforming exercise.
Aviva's problems started in January, when the platform was unavailable for six days and just one day after it came back online advisers and their clients found themselves locked out again.
Aegon's replatforming problems did not start until May, meaning they are not captured in the FCA's report.
Other, smaller platforms also had problems with client access.
Mr Bailey stated: "If consumers are unable to access the platform they have invested through then they will not be receiving the service they reasonably expect and are paying for.
"Recent complaints data tell us that firms received 15,834 complaints about their platform service, caused by general administrative or customer service problems."
He said the FCA will continue to monitor the issue, but stopped short of suggesting the regulator will intervene to solve the problem.
Among others, platforms had experienced problems with processing adviser charges, switching funds, and processing income drawdown.
david.thorpe@ft.com
