With the Financial Services Authority (FSA) becoming increasingly vocal about the quality of record keeping, especially within the specialist markets, Evaluate has decided to ramp up its already robust compliance procedures by developing a solution that can help intermediary firms, of all sizes, mitigate potential compliance risks.
Evaluate’s mortgage comparison matrix now clearly displays every piece of information that is relevant to the selection of the product. It provides everything the broker needs to justify their product selection in the specialist market and can be stored as a PDF or printed and placed in paper files.
Evaluate believes it is crucial that broker’s files are able to explain the advice given. In particular, the adviser has to be able to point to a product search list that can clearly demonstrate why the product selected was chosen; regardless of whether the case was submitted direct to a lender or via a packager. It believes that weaknesses in some incumbent sourcing system engines may have added to FSA concerns but there is no longer an excuse for advisers not to be in a position to clearly record the reasoning behind specialist product selection thanks to technological advances.
Paul Fradgley, CEO of Evaluate Technologies, said: “Having run a brokerage for a number of years, I’ve always understood the difficulty in retrospectively justifying non-conforming mortgage advice. It was one of the reasons we developed Evaluate in the first place. Our goal was to offer advisers peace of mind without the need to spend unnecessary additional effort on record-keeping. We believe that Evaluate is a crucial part of an adviser’s armoury in the current market, and in the market to come – particularly given the guidance issued recently by the FSA.”
