Firing line  

'There was a real energy in the PFS board room to get on with things'

Grant says the consumer duty will also give greater clarity on products as manufacturers think more about their suitability and target markets.

But a challenge he pointed to, which could hit smaller firms in particular, is the amount of due diligence that will be required on products to ensure ongoing suitability.

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"I think the fact that you need to continually review suitability with ongoing advice and documenting it, thinking about funds and everything else, that's probably another area that obviously consumer duty would drive change over a period of time."

This could include opening up lines of communications with providers. "How people would do that, the sheer logistics of it, I think will be a challenge for some organisations.

"You may find you wonder how many products and providers you can actually maintain if you're a small organisation."

But this does not spell the death of IFAs who, he says, have always been "entrepreneurial... and will work their way through it".

Adapting advice

Grant says everyone can benefit from sitting down with a financial planner.

He adds it is his personal mission to engage his family in their financial planning so if something happened to him they do not experience a shock.

"I ensured that I found a financial planner that my wife gets on with," he says. "It's really important that financial plans think about the whole family."

Grant does not think it is true that the majority of people cannot afford advice because "there is a whole range of different models out there for clients from online to face-to-face." And there is always an opportunity to find a model that works, he says.

But he admits there is a problem with people perceiving advice to be too expensive.

'Everyone always focuses on the monetary amount but they forget the non-financial value of advice' (Carmen Reichman/FTA)

Once demand for cheaper services picks up, more supply will follow, he says. "What we need to do in the UK is we need to make it as easy to save money as it is to borrow money.

"What we've now got is a situation where we've lost that culture of savings, we've lost the value of advice with some clients. And so what we need to do is we need to build that back. So for me, that is something that's really important.

"I think that actually what you'll find is as we demonstrate the value of advice the supply of the service will appear."

Making advice more accessible is something the regulator can help with by making it easier and cheaper to open client files, according to Grant.

The Financial Conduct Authority had planned a regime of simplified advice but has shelved these plans, saying there was little interest from the industry. It will look at the issue again as part of its review of the advice-guidance boundary.