It’s that time again: here’s the week in news – unless you’re a Labour supporter, in which case you’re forgiven for wanting to take a break from the news today.
1) Rock the proc
Christmas has been and gone but mortgage lenders have been busy giving advisers the gift of procuration fees for retention business.
There has been a spate of activity on this issue recently, with Santander introducing a minimum fee of £400 where the loan is £25,000 or more earlier this month.
Meanwhile Nationwide has said it will also pay brokers a proc fee for retention business.
And Aldermore is launching a new retention fee of 0.3 per cent for product transfers.
HSBC, which now has the dubious distinction of being the only major lender not to pay proc fees for retention business, has said it is reviewing its approach.
2) Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a superfund!
The government has proposed creating a defined benefit "superfund" to provide small DB schemes with scale.
The plan was revealed in a green paper on the future of DB schemes published this week by the Department for Work and Pensions.
On scheme affordability, the paper proposed methods to allow "stressed" DB schemes to ease their burdens, including by switching their annual pension increases from the retail price index to the consumer price index.
3) Banking on success
It’s the occasion we’ve all been waiting for, crossing off the dates on our calendars.
No, not the Oscars on Sunday or the current Six Nations championship – we’re talking about bank results week.
All the big four – plus several others – have published their results for 2016 and it was a mixed bag.
In poll position were Barclays and Lloyds, who saw their profits almost treble and more than double respectively.
The bad boys at the back of the class were HSBC and RBS. The former saw its profits tumble by 62 per cent after it was hurt by a sequence of one-off charges.
But the wooden spoon goes to RBS, whose losses tripled to £7bn during 2016 – the ninth consecutive year of losses for the bank, which is 73 per cent owned by the taxpayer.
Let’s get the champagne on ice for a full decade then…
4) Adviser’s charges are a steal
Sometimes FTAdviser covers adviser issues which fall into a grey area, but trespassing and theft, we can probably all agree, do not.
The Financial Conduct Authority has cancelled an adviser’s permission after he was convicted of just these two crimes.
Anthony Badaloo was convicted of one count of trespassing and one count of theft in October 2015 which led to FCA to conclude he “cannot be expected to act with probity”.
The FCA found Mr Badaloo, who has referred the decision to the courts, had also repeatedly failed to comply with its requests for information and not been open and co-operative with the regulator.
5) DB or not DB? The man from the Pru will tell you
Financial services giant Prudential has confirmed it will provide advice on defined benefit transfers, after receiving approval from the Financial Conduct Authority.
The announcement came in the midst of an unprecedented surge in demand for DB transfers, a result of pension freedoms and record transfer values.
It also came two weeks after the firm announced it was exiting the annuity market entirely.
