MSE News: City regulator: 'We got it wrong on PPI'

The banks and building societies that failed or came close now have more or less brand new boards, have made redundancies lower down, face expensive increased regulation, expensive minimum capital and liquidity requirements, FSCS levies etc. and are still villified.

The FSA might be being split up, but did anyone their lose well paid jobs or have their name smeared through the press who was asleep on the watch? And of course they've been able to recruit to several multiples of their former size, all paid for from a bottomless pit of taxpayer money, and all the jobs that have been created are well paid central London based finance jobs.

But no one bats an eye-lid because they are the 'good guys' :mad:

"But the FCA will be different, Wheatley insists. It will be able to shoot first and ask questions later.

But will it?

For all the good the regulator has been, you might as well have put the BBA in charge of monitoring the banks. At least we would have known up front whose interest they would have been serving.

I have no faith that the FCA of the future will be any better for consumers than the FSA has been in the past. I think they are only talking the talk without the stomach for walking the walk.

Why put an executive from a failed organisation in charge of the FCA unless it is intended that it fails again?

The PIA, FSA and FCA are all the same apart from the initials. Change the names of certain things, tweak things here and there but its just a name.

Those of us in the retail financial services industry will tell you how useless the FSA has been. It comes up with hair brained schemes which cost a fortune to implement and benefit no-one whilst totally ignoring the issues which everyone in the industry knows exists. Those schemes it brings in have often been scrapped or reduced in priority but still have to be done even though they are totally pointless but they wont admit it.

IFAs account for 3000 complaints at the FOS each year. That is 1% of total complaints (despite dominating the retail distribution). One of the biggest and most expensive set of changes the FSA has put in place is the Retail Distribution Review which affects IFAs.

Any normal person would look at where the problems are and focus on those. Not the FSA.

It used to be said that the FSA targeted IFAs as most of the staff were ex bankers. That is not the case any more as they focused on straight out of uni graduates. But it used to be a big problem.

dunstonh wrote: »

It used to be said that the FSA targeted IFAs as most of the staff were ex bankers. That is not the case any more as they focused on straight out of uni graduates. But it used to be a big problem.

Is it better to be advised by an ex-banker, or a straight out of uni graduate?

If I had to choose I'd prefer to hear what the ex banker had to say. But I wouldn't trust either of them with my money.