The ‘Big Bang’ of the 1980s had far-reaching consequences. Rules, many unwritten traditions involving all sorts of handshakes which had held together the City and our financial system for possibly a couple of hundred years, were binned in the name of Thatcherite, free-market progress. Suddenly, you could become a merchant banker without having been to public school and banks could own stockbrokers and insurance companies. Anyone could become a dealer in all sorts of things no-one had previously heard of, fortunes were made, then lost, when it all came home to roost in 2009. And here, it seems, we go again, with a post-Brexit Big Bang 2. To paraphrase the late, great George Micheal, what have we learned from all this pain? Very little, I suspect.
“FCA: ‘We’re not against small firms’”
We’ve always been a small firm, even when we thought we were big, as the official classification is ‘ten advisers or less’. There is a, perhaps justifiable perception that our regulator would prefer to regulate far fewer big firms, rather than the many thousands of smaller adviser companies which are still in the vast majority, with over 88% of the 4,600 odd directly-authorised financial advisers comprising less than 5 advisers.
