A Bit About Advice Firm Compliance

My Background In Financial Services

Advice Firm Compliance Ltd was founded on a straightforward observation. The compliance support available to smaller IFA firms is good at providing technical knowledge, but rarely goes further than that. The firm’s owners are often told what needs to be done and left to complete this work themselves, in addition to looking after their own clients, managing their Advisers and their wider team and coping with the other demands of running their business. For many business owners, the gap between knowing what is required and having the time and resources to do it properly is often the problem.

Advice Firm Compliance Ltd exists to close that gap. The business was founded by someone who has spent the better part of a career doing exactly that kind of work within an IFA firm, and who understands from direct experience what it takes to manage compliance properly in a small advice business.

I have worked in Financial Services for over 42 years. The first sixteen of those were spent in branch banking with Barclays Bank, before moving into the Independent Financial Adviser sector, where the following 26 years were spent in a range of roles working with and alongside IFA firms. That time in the IFA sector included positions with some of the industry’s most well-known firms, including Fidelity Investments, Clerical Medical, Friends Provident, Ascentric, Skandia (now Quilter), and Intelliflo, building a broad and detailed understanding of how the advice industry works from a number of different angles.

The nine years immediately prior to founding Advice Firm Compliance Ltd, I spent as Practice Manager at Courtney Havers LLP, a small IFA firm in Tonbridge. It was during this period that the compliance function became a central and increasingly significant part of the role. I developed a thorough, practical understanding of what the FCA expects of small firms from a compliance perspective and applied a pragmatic approach to managing the firm’s compliance requirements and implementing regulatory change as necessary.

Leading Through Regulatory Change

The past decade has been one of the most demanding periods of regulatory change the financial advice sector has experienced. During my time at Courtney Havers LLP, I took the firm through a number of the most significant regulatory developments of recent years, including GDPR, MiFID II, the Senior Managers and Certification Regime, and, most recently, the Consumer Duty regulation. Each of these required the design and implementation of new policies, procedures, and processes, as well as the training and embedding of new ways of working across the business.

This direct experience of leading regulatory change within a working IFA firm is at the heart of what Advice Firm Compliance Ltd offers. I do not approach compliance from a purely theoretical perspective. I approach it as a practitioner who has managed these exacting requirements in a real business environment and who understands both what the FCA expects to see and what it takes to deliver it in practice.

Why I Work The Way I Do

The experience of working as a full-time compliance professional within a small IFA firm made one thing clear. The compliance support most readily available to firms of that size is valuable but incomplete. Technical compliance consultancies provide the knowledge firms need to understand their obligations. What they typically do not provide is the resource to actually carry out the work. That responsibility falls back on the business owner, who is usually also an adviser, a manager, and the person ultimately responsible for growing the business.

Advice Firm Compliance Ltd was created to provide what is missing. I am not providing a consultancy that advises from a distance. I am a compliance partner who works alongside you, takes on the practical delivery of your compliance obligations, and gives you back the time to focus on your clients and your business. Every service I offer is built around that principle, and every engagement is shaped around the specific needs and circumstances of the firm I am working with.

Get In Touch

If you would like to find out more about Advice Firm Compliance Ltd and how we work, please get in touch. We are happy to have an initial conversation about your firm’s compliance requirements and how we may be able to help, with no obligation.