Stephen Atkins, managing director at Freedom Finance, said the regulator has started to break up its supervisory team into specific areas and will target firms’ compliance capabilities including promotions, systems and controls and senior management.
He said: “Now things have settled down a bit since ‘Mortgage Day’ the FSA is commencing its quest to go out there and see how firms are coping.
“We have been told they are stating to arrange meetings and appointments with various firms, so brokers should really now be checking that everything is to the standard that the FSA’s rules require.”
Chris Cummings, director of the Association of Mortgage Intermediaries (AMI), commented: “The FSA said it would give firms three months to get their systems in check so now we can expect supervision from the regulator to increase.
“The FSA is now going back to firms to see if they have honoured the commitment they made to have effective controls and compliance in place. If they haven’t, they better have some good reasons.”
The FSA also confirmed that its ‘hit squad’, which Mortgage Introducer - News revealed last October was going out to target those firms that were still doing unregulated business post-‘Mortgage Day’, was active in the market and details of its progress would be released later in this quarter.
Vanessa Wood, spokeswoman at the FSA, said it could not release any specific details but added: “The two main areas of priority were always going to be for us to guard the perimeters to make sure there aren’t any firms out there that were trading while unregulated and also to go out and visit firms to confirm everything is in order.”
