If the election of Donald Trump wasn’t enough evidence that we live in the end of days, then consider that supermarkets have started rationing iceberg lettuce.
But don’t worry: here’s the week in news.
1) Consolidator crackdown
The Financial Conduct Authority has decided there’s something rotten in the state of financial advice consolidators.
After spending several months looking into their business practices, the regulator has said it is "disappointed" to find none of the firms involved were able to demonstrate clients’ needs were suitably considered on a consistent basis.
While there were some examples of good practice, the FCA said firms tended to focus on the commercial benefits of consolidation and did not focus on the impact on the client.
All the six firms involved had to make changes to their business practices as a result of the review.
One of them was Attivo, whose chief executive Stephen Harper said the experience was positive, adding the business is better for it.
2) Red lights on at HBoS
Naturally most financial advisers will have had plenty of liaisons with porn stars and luxury holidays through their career, but for Lynden Scourfield it all ended in tears.
The 54-year-old former lead director of HBoS’s impaired-assets division has been jailed for 11 years after forcing struggling clients to use the services of his friend David Mills, 60, in return for evenings with high-class hookers and lavish gifts.
For his part in the escapade, Mills has been jailed for 15 years.
Scourfield headed a division at HBoS that dealt with small companies in financial distress and lent eye-watering sums of cash to the failing businesses as Mills and his associates charged exorbitant fees for “consultancy services” and ran the companies into the ground.
3) Phoenix turns transfers to ash
Phoenix Group, the UK’s largest specialist consolidator of closed life and pension funds, has revealed the scale of potentially fraudulent pension transfers it has had to tackle.
Since the start of 2013 Phoenix has revealed it has prevented around £30m of potentially fraudulent pension transfers.
A poll it commissioned of 2,002 UK adults, carried out from 16 to 19 December 2016, revealed more than one quarter (26 per cent) of UK adults have received a ‘cold’ contact about their pension in the last six months of last year.
4) Dashboard shows advisers going slow
If advisers thought they were rushed off their feet then the pensions dashboard could be the answer.
At least, that’s what Ian McKenna says.
The independent member of the government-appointed pensions dashboard steering group said a comprehensive pension dashboard could cut the cost of financial advice by up to 25 per cent by freeing advisers from the time-consuming business of tracking down all their clients' pension pots.
Mr McKenna, who is also director of fintech consultancy F&TRC, told FTAdviser a fully-functioning pension dashboard would allow advisers to view all their members' pension pots at the click of a button.
5) If it ain’t brokered…
Mortgage brokers have been rapped on the knuckles by two second-charge lenders which have questioned whether they are meeting their obligations.
Together and Enterprise Finance have expressed concern about a lack of awareness of the product among brokers.
Under the Mortgage Credit Directive rules, which came into effect in March 2016, brokers need to decide whether they want to advise on second charge mortgages.
If they don’t, they will need to bring this to their clients’ attention so they are aware it is an available option, even if not one offered by that broker.
But Gary Bailey, sales director at Together, said his company’s research found 79 per cent of people in the UK were completely unaware of second charge mortgages.
