FAQs

Yes. Once you commit to using us, a consultant will be allocated to you and will be your primary contact throughout our relationship. We believe this provides a level of consistency because the consultant really gets to know your business, so you don’t have to repeat yourself on each visit. People do occasionally move on, but if this happens, you’ll be allocated a new consultant and a full handover will be completed.

All our consultants hold the minimum of CII Diploma (QCF4), with some holding the prestigious Chartered designation. They also have various specialist qualifications, such as pension transfers, advanced mortgages, long-term care, supervision and equity release. Should you decide to work with us, we’ll provide your consultant’s CV to help fulfil your due diligence requirements.

We’re members of the Association of Professional Compliance Consultants and attend regular meetings with them, which often involve the FCA. All our consultants are Personal Finance Society and/or Charted Institute for Securities & Investment members and we’d be happy to share our CPD records with you.

We find that most of our clients have a good idea about how much support they’ll need during the year, so our compliance packages make sense for them, as these spread costs. Bear in mind that the support packages provide discounted rates for committing to a minimum 12-month contract. We also offer our services on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis, with an ad hoc time-charged support contract, meaning you only pay for the time you use.

Our retainer contracts are open-ended, with a minimum 12-month commitment. Once the first 12 months is up, the contract can be cancelled by giving us four months’ notice.

All payments for monthly retainer clients are by standing order. Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) services are invoiced on completion of the work for project work, or at the end of each month, with payment requested within 14 days.

There’s no difference in the services we offer. The difference is in the charging structures. Under a PAYG retainer, our hourly rate applies and you’ll be charged by the hour in increments of 15 minutes. For example, if you place a query with the helpdesk, the time taken to answer this would be billed in increments of 15 minutes, so if the query took 30 minutes to answer, your invoice would show 30 minutes. Our retainer options provide support time at a fixed price, with the cost spread over the year.

Small consumer credit firms to fund houses and everything in between. If you’re unsure whether we’d support you, give us a call for a no-obligation chat.

Whatever you need! A support day can be anything from a general chat around themes and trends in the industry (which will count towards your CPD) through to a full compliance health check and everything in between.

Yes. We can help with all aspects of the application process, from a simple variation of permission to a full application. Visit our FCA authorisation page for more information.

We commit to completing pre-sale file reviews within three working days and post-sale within five working days.

Yes. We have experts in the discretionary sector and can help from application to ensuring your documents are all in place, including ICAAP, Pillar 3, RTS 28, remunerations code and so on.

Yes. We have a full suite of template documents, all of which can be purchased separately, although our compliance packages do include varying levels of access to these. For firms that prefer to have a compliance manual, this can be provided at additional cost.

Though you can’t outsource your responsibility, you can outsource as much of the compliance work as you wish. This could be day-to-day things like maintaining registers, reviewing and updating policies and the collation of KPIs, or GABRIEL returns. Alternatively, you might like us to focus on more specialist areas, such as changes in regulation, completing adviser 1-2-1s and other T&C activities, or writing your PROD service and investment proposition document.

No. We appreciate that these big companies provide valuable discounts on software and research data and that isn’t our area of focus. Our service is hands-on, providing the manpower and knowledge to help you achieve your compliance obligations, so we’re happy to work alongside your existing provider.