I am sick and tired of hearing this now. I have been complaining about the policy of lenders not divulging information to brokers for years. Protecting your customers is bull and eveyone knows it.
Accord Mortgages, for example, does not need any documents signing at all – in fact, you can even submit and deal with it if you are not the original broker. All the life offices let you deal with them with policies and investments, so why not mortgage providers? Do you see yourselves as some special entity within the financial services industry? Because I don’t.
I think this is Draconian, and in this day and age someone should be made accountable. Why not, if on our terms of business (which is one of the most important documents a client has to sign), we had a section worded so that any provider we submitted business to on behalf of the client can have access to information required. Let’s face it – there are enough tick boxes on lenders’ forms asking for permission to keep in touch and for third parties as well.
Is it okay, for some unqualified adviser from Mumbai or elsewhere to ring up and try and sell payment protection for credit cards, but not for a qualified financial adviser to give valuable advice to the client? On top of the fact you wouldn’t have got the customer if it wasn’t for us.
I think this comes under ‘Treating Customers Fairly’ as well. If a client wishes to seek some advice from us and needs it immediately, then the provider should be able to give us that information.I doubt this will ever be resolved until the FSA makes something mandatory for us to be able to get information that we want. In the meantime, I will keep kicking the wall in frustration at these lenders.
Nigel Pamment
Inspirational Financial Management
