Royal London to help advisers meet FCA obligations with new service

Under the current rules, the FCA’s best practice standards require advisers to collate all the information they need from various sources and pull that information together, along with their recommendations, into a client facing report. After a client review, advisers are then required to keep an audit trail of their conversation and recommendations in an adviser report.

The online service automatically collates all the information relevant to clients’ Royal London pensions into individual client reports, tailored to the adviser’s requirements, allowing them to focus their time on important recommendations for their clients.

The adviser report, which is also automatically available, documents everything in the client report plus extra detail that advisers typically need such as, projection assumptions, breakdown of their client’s pension contributions. This adviser record of the client’s review provides an audit trail to help them meet the FCA requirements.

The Review Service aims to enable advisers to be more effective in meeting their compliance requirements and to demonstrate due diligence, by having the full adviser and client reports automatically available on their records, as well as saving them time.

Colin Mitchell, Head of Pensions Proposition at Royal London’s intermediary business, commented: “Good client outcomes are in everyone’s interest. Our new Review Service provides advisers with an easier and more efficient review process, allowing them to concentrate their efforts on what really matters – adding ‘real’ value for their clients with advice on their current pension and their potential options and choices, which can often be quite complex.

"Royal London has a long history of developing support tools for advisers and consumers in the pensions market and the Review Service is yet another example of where we’ve seen the potential to use technology for the benefit of both advisers and their clients. We’re continually looking to identify and improve the services we offer, to provide advisers with smarter ways of working and which also offer a better experience for their clients.

“We’ve had an extremely positive reaction from the advisers who helped us in developing the Review Service. It has also provided us with the opportunity to demonstrate our understanding of their needs and how working together we’re able to help them improve the service they’re able to offer their clients.”