Pictured: Lang Cat's Steven Nelson
Advisers continue to face hurdles on products and services a year into Consumer Duty, with a recent study having highlighted mass frustration.
Over a third (34%) of advisers surveyed by The Lang Cat for its State of the Advice Nation (SOTAN) study suggested that Consumer Duty products and services efforts had been a "waste of time" and "nothing has changed".
More than half (55%) felt there was more work to be done.
Consumer Duty has "dominated" the sector, Lang Cat insight director Steven Nelson told PA, with its influence felt not just throughout the regulatory landscape but also through "knock on effects" within conferences, seminars, content and trade media coverage. However, the early findings paint a "pretty bleak" picture.
"My instincts and my beliefs based on the conversations we have with advice firms… there's a tangible sense that the regulation isn't biting the real day to day grind of what the advice profession faces," Nelson said. "I'm talking about things like service standards, transfer standards, letter of authority, the classic stuff where, how can you as an advice professional think anything else of the sector and of regulation when you're still on hold for an hour to some legacy providers?"
Service struggles a driver of frustration
Frustrations outlined in the SOTAN research could effectively be a "proxy response" to difficulties faced by advisers on a day-to-day basis, Nelson suggested.
Recent Lang Cat research with Parmenion on The Impact of Poor Platform Service, a separate project to SOTAN, found that 95% of respondents had to apologise to clients on behalf of providers in the past year. More than a third (34%) of platform contact instances were to chase up existing work in a queue.
"We looked at transfers this year, and we looked at things like, what's your typical worst- case scenario for an end-to-end time, for a transfer to come through," Nelson said. "You get stories of six months, nine months a year, over a year, and that's someone coming in, either off the street or from a referral into an advice process.
"You're giving them [clients] the best modern coaching-led, behavioural-led, wellness-led, cash flow modelling, all great stuff that we see in the advice profession in 2024, and then the client experiences the industry behind the scenes, and you're having to tell them, ‘I don't know when the money will be across, I don't know when the financial plan will be implemented, because we know there's hold ups here', and you just you start to apologise on behalf of the sector to your clients, and it's just not cool, right?"
Current platform service levels are a "huge problem" for the industry, Parmenion CEO Martin Jennings said in November.
The latest SOTAN study showed that Consumer Duty is having a tangible impact on firms, with 38% of firms having already changed their fee models and another 21% saying this was under consideration.
Lang Cat received responses from 501 industry professionals for this year's SOTAN survey, a 25% jump. The full findings are expected to be published in February.
