Daniel Harrison, senior partner at the financial services firm, said: “If someone tries to lobby or speak up on behalf of the IFA industry, these sabre rattlers get on their backs and they end up being called ‘worse than muck’.
“There are some really good people in the industry but, whenever they speak up, other IFAs criticise them and in the end they think ‘you know what, I’m going to get on with my clients and just keep my head down’.”
Harrison said this meant good spokespeople are not heard and are therefore unable to unite the industry meaning it is more marginalised from political decision making than it should be.
Meanwhile, Harrison said he felt strongly that the Financial Services Authority (FSA) had focused on the wrong part of the advice process, and that it should not have regulated the sale but the product instead.
“Once a product is sold, the adviser should step out of the way. For example, in the car industry, if you had bought a Toyota Prius a few years ago when there was a fault with the car, the product was recalled and the guy that sold the car was not involved.
“[But] in our industry, if your pension doesn’t perform as it should ten or 20 years down the line, the adviser – the person that sold the product – gets hammered.
“Similarly, there is nothing to prevent customers from going onto payday lenders’ websites to borrow £3,000 at an exorbitant interest rate. Yet if an adviser wants to help a client invest £3,000, regulation states that the client must have a full fact find, a suitability report and demonstrate they offer the full range of research.”
“The industry is treated very differently from others,” he added.
