This should be a great job. Helping clients, the face-to-face meeting with them, the research, dealing with different organisations (except for phone queuing systems) is an immensely interesting and satisfying job.
However, the interference from this wretched regulator is threatening to make the job a misery.
Your online bulletin last week said it succinctly. ‘The FSA believes that firms are putting customer satisfaction before TCF practices’ – whatever next? Nurses putting patient care before targets? Teachers putting teaching children before filling in paperwork?
Oh, I forgot, this is what already happens in this country where this government of pathetic little men interferes in everything it knows nothing about. My dislike of the government is not politically inspired as I was a Labour man all my life until these last few years.
All my life I have made my fundamentals of business the keeping of a clear conscience and treating people the way I would like to be treated.
My employer made it a disciplinary matter over 20 years ago if you were honest enough to tell a client that their endowment was not guaranteed to pay off their mortgage. I told every one as I had always done. It pays too, as you receive so many recommendations. Now we are supposed to be spending hours measuring these immeasurable principles.
Oh, and another thing from last week’s letters. ‘Broke broker’, researching a self-employed builder client, I hope you are reporting him under the money laundering regulations if you suspect he is not declaring his full income to Mr Darling’s lackeys.
Unless he has been in business a very short time, you have to have his declared income to show why you have not recommended a full status mortgage, so I hope you have a very good reason to explain the difference in the figures if not. We are now unpaid tax inspectors too.
I loathe tax avoidance from the very top right down but I don’t see it as being my duty to report it. Drugs and crime proceeds yes; tax avoidance is also immoral but it doesn’t kill others.
It is a matter of great regret to me that I wish to be anonymous but that is how little I trust this regulator not to be vengeful.
He who can does. He who cannot, regulates.
A well-off and still busy broker
