Speaking at a recent dinner organised by the Association of Mortgage Intermediaries (AMI) Clive Briault, managing director of retail markets at the FSA, said that the regulator was keen to see shorter and therefore more easily comparable KFIs. He said that the FSA had originally envisaged documents that would range between two and four pages long.
It is also understood that the FSA will now allow supplementary information to be provided by lenders, though it will not form part of the KFI.
Briault is scheduled to speak at the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) annual conference next week and it is now widely expected he will use this opportunity to give lenders greater guidance on KFI production.
Tony Corrigan, managing director of Classic Network Solutions, commented: “While the FSA gave some very detailed guidance in the MCOB rules, it did sit back a bit while lenders created the KFIs we currently find ourselves with. The CML should have also shown a much stronger lead on this issue”
He added: “The way things have worked out, with some lenders creating thirteen-page documents, you know that the client is never going to be able to wade through all of the information. It just defeats the whole point of the exercise.”
Tony Jones, managing director of Pink Home Loans, agreed that the CML and the FSA could have given more guidance in the first instance, however he said he felt some lenders may have been a little over zealous when attempting to ensure their documents were safe.
“We don’t want a rewriting of the MCOB rules, all we really want is something that is easy for the customer to understand,” he said. “At the moment it looks like it is the lenders’ lawyers who are the main beneficiaries of the documents.”
