Sesame Bankhall Group is primed to shake-off its past traumas and emerge as an end-to-end compliance provider for the modern advice business, according to its executive chairman.
Sesame Bankhall Group has spent years being dogged by loss-making and regulatory fines for business practices that broke the rules.
The company posted an £11.6m loss back in 2015 - the year it closed its investment adviser arm after a string of concerns about mis-selling - but John Cowan told FTAdviser while the business has “historical liabilities”, the “go forward” businesses were all profitable and in good shape.
When asked whether, two years on from a strategic review that followed the wealth arm's closure, the group was in the shape he wanted it be in, Mr Cowan confirmed it was.
“We’re now in a place where [parent company] Aviva sees us as a strategic asset of the wider business,” he added.
Mr Cowan also revealed more about its regulatory compliance service, which the group has just launched.
He said: “Traditionally the Bankhall piece has been about helping directly authorised advisers through compliance and regulatory interpretation, that’s what it’s known for in the market.
“The management team has a view of what we want it to become which is really to help advisers run better businesses and what that means is we want to be able to deliver a service to them and that’s part of the planning, to do it from beginning to end.”
Part of this drive to adapt to the times is to do with the problems Cowan sees coming down the road which could hit Sesame since it shut to investment advisers to focus on its mortgage broker arm.
Mr Cowan has warned mortgage advisers and brokers may be obliged to discuss risk profiling with customers in the future by the regulator.
The executive chairman said the group was helping those in the mortgage space to “get ahead of the game” and become “new” mortgage advisers as he expected the mortgage sector to be held to the same standards by the FCA as wealth advisers.
In a video interview with FTAdviser’s Emma Hughes, Mr Cowan explained: “In the wealth space, the obligations on wealth advisers when they’re advising a client to teach them about volatility, risk profiling, all of that stuff, and due diligence on the platforms.”
He admitted it was “an enormous amount of obligation on the adviser to do the job with the customer to make sure the customer is clear”.
“If you flip the coin over and look at debt, which is what a mortgage is after all, an individual in this country can go and take advice from a mortgage broker, get a mortgage fixed, get great service, but no obligation whatsoever to talk to that customer about risk,” he pointed out.
“Now I think the regulator [the FCA] at some point who’s looking at the mortgage market, will get to a space that says, this is an obligation on the mortgage broker to do that.”
