Compliance that goes beyond advice – we don’t just tell you what needs doing, we work alongside you and your team to get the job done.
How We Can Help
Advice Firm Compliance Ltd provides practical, hands-on compliance support to small and medium-sized Independent Financial Adviser firms. Rather than simply providing guidance and leaving you to act on it, we work directly alongside you and your team to complete the compliance work for you. Founded by a former FCA-authorised Compliance Oversight and Money Laundering Reporting Officer with over 26 years of experience in the IFA sector, we have a thorough, working understanding of what good compliance looks like in practice and what the FCA expects to see.
All services are tailored to the specific needs and structure of your firm. If you have a compliance requirement not covered below, please get in touch to discuss how we may be able to help.
A well-constructed compliance framework is the foundation of a well-run advice firm. Without the right documentation, policies, and monitoring processes in place, even well-intentioned firms can find themselves exposed to regulatory risk. We begin by reviewing the FCA’s current policy and thematic review requirements and mapping them against your existing framework, identifying any gaps and ensuring your business meets all minimum required standards.
From there, we create or review your firm’s core processes and procedures across every area the FCA expects to see documented. This covers your advice and investment process, including your Centralised Investment Process and Centralised Retirement Income Process, as well as your approach to financial crime, data protection and data security, complaints handling, business continuity and disaster recovery, risk management, Training and Competency, systems and controls, and client disclosure documentation. Each of these is tailored specifically to how your firm operates.
The FCA’s Consumer Duty regulation places significant and ongoing obligations on advice firms to demonstrate that they are consistently delivering good outcomes for clients. Meeting these requirements demands careful, continuous work across a number of interconnected areas, and the annual Consumer Duty Board Report requires firms to evidence that work in a structured and meaningful way.
We manage the practical delivery of Consumer Duty compliance on your behalf. This covers client segmentation and target market assessments, platform and provider due diligence, products and services assessments, and price and value assessments. We collate and report ongoing management information to your senior management team on a monthly or quarterly basis, and we compile and complete your annual Consumer Duty Board Report. Throughout the year, we support ongoing outcomes monitoring to ensure your firm can demonstrate continued compliance with the regulation’s requirements.
Building a compliance framework is only the starting point. Maintaining it, evidencing it, and keeping it current is where the real work lies, and it is also where many smaller firms struggle due to the demands of running a business and looking after clients at the same time.
We design and run your monthly compliance monitoring plan on an ongoing basis, producing clear, structured records of the work completed. This gives you a continuously updated, evidence-based compliance record that demonstrates to the FCA that compliance is being actively managed within your firm throughout the year, not just reviewed at annual intervals.
A robust Training and Competency framework is a regulatory requirement for all FCA-authorised advice firms and a key component of your Consumer Duty obligations, providing evidence that your advisers are competent and that clients continue to receive useful advice. Whilst we cannot act as your T&C supervisor, we can provide you with the practical support, for example, creating and managing all aspects of your T&C scheme.
We begin by creating a competency framework tailored to your firm, setting out a clear journey for new and developing advisers. We conduct regular file reviews to assess the quality and suitability of advice being delivered, carry out one-to-one interviews with advisers, and undertake role plays and meeting observations. We also monitor and report on key performance indicators, giving you and your advisers a clear, ongoing picture of progress and any areas that require development.
Keeping on top of FCA reporting obligations is a critical but time-consuming responsibility. Errors or missed deadlines can attract regulatory scrutiny, and the consequences of non-compliance in this area can be serious. We manage your regulatory submissions for you, including RegData submissions, Directory Persons notifications, Variation of Permissions applications, and Senior Management and Certified Function appointments. We ensure that all submissions are accurate, completed on time, and properly documented, reducing the risk of errors and helping your firm maintain a clean compliance record with the regulator.
We recognise that every advice firm is different, and that compliance needs do not always fit neatly into predefined categories. If you have a specific compliance project or requirement not covered by the services listed above, please contact us to discuss how we may be able to help. We are experienced in managing a wide range of compliance-related work and are happy to explore how we can provide practical support tailored to your firm’s individual circumstances.
At Advice Firm Compliance, we offer transparent, flexible pricing to suit the needs of your business. Depending on the scope and nature of the work, services are charged either on an hourly or daily rate basis, agreed with you in advance, so there are no surprises. We are currently in the process of registering for VAT; once registered, VAT will be applied to all invoices in accordance with HMRC requirements, and you will be notified accordingly. We believe in clear, honest communication about costs from the outset, because when it comes to compliance, you deserve an adviser you can trust completely.
What Our Customers Have To Say
Ian is a ‘hands-on’ consultant who offers practical and straightforward support, and apart from making sure that I am on top of all compliance matters, his attention to detail has helped me enormously with our regulatory submissions
If you would like to discuss how Advice Firm Compliance can support your firm, please get in touch. We are happy to have an initial conversation about your compliance requirements with no obligation.
