Firing lineJun 25 2020

Tapper: To protect clients from scams you have to be proactive

twitter-iconfacebook-iconlinkedin-iconmail-iconprint-icon
Search supported by
Tapper: To protect clients from scams you have to be proactive

For the founder of start-up Age Wage and industry blog the Pension Plowman this common endeavour is to help people save for later life so they can look forward to a “secure, happy retirement”.

He says there is an increasing need for such help at “a time of growing uncertainty and mystification around pensions”.

Challenges to this “common endeavour” are rife at the moment, and especially manifest by way of scammers.

Covid-19 is providing a hotbed of opportunity for those with malicious intent to exploit the financial difficulties many people are going through.

Scammers soothe related anxieties by offering false methods to cash in pensions or get a too-good-to-be-true transfer deal. Many of those targeted by scammers are older people, and are often very vulnerable, but not always.

Family tradition

Feeling protective of people in later life is perhaps something handed down by his parents.

Mr Tapper’s mother was a nurse and his late father was a geriatric GP turned politician and care home owner, and he holds his parents partly responsible for his interest in later-life security.

He became engaged with the subject of pensions in his 20s. He developed an early fascination for how people went about organising their finances for retirement and became professionally involved in insurance companies.

Lately he has been working with actuaries trying to predict how long we are going to live and how long our money is going to last. These are “tough questions that fascinate me”, he says.

He says his parents have always been his inspiration, and sees his work as being closely connected to their former mission of caring for people who were ageing, many of whom are vulnerable.

Emotional cost of a scam 

Mr Tapper is passionate about protecting people from being taken advantage of and identifies clearly the emotional as well as financial cost of falling for a scam.

He says: “You will often find people who have been scammed are extremely fond of the people they have been duped by and they find it extremely hard to reject that person. They’ve invested emotional capital in that person, so they have great difficulty disinvesting that emotional capital.”

Mr Tapper knows this experience first-hand. Only this May he felt hope and optimism when Age Wage was approached by a large hedge fund offering pro-bono work and offering a great deal of money for the business.

After a lot of investigation he discovered the organisation had less than worthy intentions.

“So we didn’t actually fall for it, but we wasted a lot of time on it, and it is very easy, especially at this time, to be beguiled by what seemed to be a very altruistic approach.”

He adds: “Usually it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Damage control

Mr Tapper feels that educating the public is important in order to limit their potential to be scammed.

For this reason, Age Wage has collaborated with PensionBee, Smart Pension and Nutmeg to create a mobile app aptly named ‘Scam Man and Robbin’. In this fun and engaging app targeted at 55 to 60-year-olds, users literally “fight off the ploys of the scammer in a Space Invaders-type game”.

As well as companies devising fun educational tools for the public, Mr Tapper feels that financial advisers also have great potential and “a duty” to protect their clients from hoaxes and scams.

“I think the obvious thing for all financial advisers is to stay alert. If you are in the business of trying to protect your clients then you have to be proactive.”

He cites the case of the Tata steelworkers in Port Talbot a couple of years ago: “It was quite clear talking to these steelworkers that they weren’t being protected by the Financial Conduct Authority and they weren’t being protected by the trustees, and there were IFAs who weren’t doing their job either.”

However, Mr Tapper holds up the example of a number of diligent, courageous IFAs who “were doing their job” protecting people.

“A whole bunch of great IFAs all got together and formed a group called Chive, headed up by Al Rush. Chive staved off the worse of the scamming and helped [some] people avoid being scammed altogether. Those people who were being ripped off are being helped by the group as well”.

Mr Tapper says his message to IFAs is: “You guys know what you are doing. It’s a question of getting on the front foot, being proactive and being bold, and not being scared because everyone tells you don’t get involved, don’t whistle-blow, but if everyone had that attitude we would all get scammed because nobody would be there to protect anyone.”

The upshot of scams is “a massive increase in professional indemnity policy costs for IFAs, which is collectively bad… It does come back to bite you and we all need to protect each other”, he says.

Having witnessed first-hand the power of a good IFA to proactively protect clients and change people’s lives when they are most vulnerable, Mr Tapper reflects on his own personal direction.

“I guess my job is about empowering people to do things for themselves – giving them the encouragement, engagement and access to tools to do things for themselves. But where they can’t do it for themselves or they feel they really ought to be getting some help because they don’t want to, that is where advisers come in. And I’m really keen to get good advisers in place.”

Anita Boniface is a freelance journalist