The Financial Conduct Authority's new Consumer Duty is now 6 months old - what lenders, pension providers, investment houses, and insurers are showing signs of not following the new principle.

Lenders are still not following the spirit of the new consumer duty reigeme, with their strategic repricing of products only when cut off dates have been reached for clients to make any changes, not informing clients who fix a product directly via the lender when a better rate is available and in appalling customer service, if we did a lot of what they do we would have the FCA breathing down our necks, as always its one rule for the big guys and another for the small ones.

To be fair, I think they have all made some changes. If they receive work from us, as advisers, we should already have checked most things out anyway, so they have little to worry about there. I do think there will be some sort of adverse credit reform on the horizon. It may be seen as unfair to penalise people for bad credit over a year ago as their life may have changed since then. We will wait and see. On the whole, we have a good relationship with lenders and dont often have any issues with bad service, if this does happen though, we make sure its taken higher up the chain.

Whenever we see a change in the regulatory landscape, we often have this debate, and it often boils down to those who are following the spirit of the rule change and those that are following the "letter of the law". For smaller firms, it is often far quicker and easier to amend systems and processes, whereas the larger the firm the more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive that becomes. In the financial advice world that most often results in advice firms embracing the change and going with the spirit of the new rules, whereas providers tend to do the minimum that is required of them - the "letter of the law" approach. Whilst both mean the firm is complying with the regulator's requirements, they are doing so in quite diverse ways. This in turn can lead to tensions when there is then a mismatch between how the advice firm would handle a situation and how the provider does. It will be interesting to see how the FCA views these decisions.

We've been surprised by some lender and insurer activities not showing more consumer-friendly activity since August 1st and the implementation of the Financial Conduct Authorities' new principles. Even when challenged that a particular form of activity doesn't meet muster under Consumer Duty staff at mortgage companies seem uninterested and unfazed that anything should have changed from their usual business-as-usual stance. Was this new initiative by the regulator simply a paper/management information revamp for these providers, it makes you wonder when their employees at the coal face pay little attention to the words "but the clients are being disadvantaged". Truly worrying.