Speaking on a Mortgage Solutions video panel debate, Jeremy Duncombe (pictured), managing director of Accord Mortgages, said lenders had worked with industry trade bodies to develop their Consumer Duty statements to make sure it adhered to Financial Conduct Authority standards. 

He said Accord produced nine fair value notices which covered different areas for each of its customer types. 

“The customer can see that this is targeted for them, [and] the distributor can understand who our market is. From a fee point of view, a lot of things that go into the fair value notices and that are required by Consumer Duty are more of documenting what is already happening,” Duncombe added. 

He said a huge amount of work had gone into developing the statements alongside big project teams to “get to a point where we are documenting things, [the] majority of which were done before in the mortgage market”. 

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Pointing to the example of fees, Duncombe said Accord always had a policy which monitored what brokers charged their clients. 

“If they charge over a figure that we didn’t think was fair, we would actually come back out to the distributor and say ‘you either need to reduce your fee or we can’t offer this mortgage’. 

“So, it’s putting stuff like that into a fair value notice so that the market is consistent and other lenders have similar policies.” 

Duncombe said Consumer Duty would get customers to a point where they understand that they are getting fair value and the right advice. 

He said the advice given was already good and it would not change by a “massive amount”, but added “it’s that consistency and the fact that it’s being talked about. And the more you talk about something, the more people pay attention and make sure it’s right.” 

 

This is the third in a series of four videos by Jeremy Duncombe, managing director at Accord Mortgages, Clare Beardmore, director of Legal and General Mortgage Club, Stephanie Charman, strategic relationships director at Sesame Bankhall Group and host Victoria Hartley, contributing editor of Mortgage Solutions. 

Watch out for the final episode in the series, out on Thursday on Mortgage Solutions.