FAQs

Do we get enhanced commission from providers if we appoint you as our compliance consultants?
No, we are specialists in compliance consultancy and concentrate on this area alone. Anyone seeking to balance compliance consultancy costs against enhanced commission should be cautious as it is very seldom possible to get the best of both worlds.

Financial services regulation is becoming increasingly complex. How can you guarantee that you always have the right answers?
We would not, of course, ever guarantee any such thing! However, we always make every effort to achieve this and, so far, can fairly say that we have not been caught out. We retain a small network of individuals, highly qualified in specific areas who we can, and frequently do, call upon to provide definitive answers when we feel we need them. The retaining is a formal, rather than a casual, arrangement, in as much as they are actually on our payroll.

Regulation is crippling my business. Will there ever be an end to it?
Financial services in the UK is over regulated. Sadly, it is not always competently regulated either. There is an increasing threat of even more regulation coming in from Europe through the European Savings Directive and MiFID (Markets in Financial Instrument Directive). These unfortunately promise even more red tape for little benefit that anyone can see. On the plus side, the Government does seem to be becoming increasingly concerned that the financial services industry in this country is becoming strangulated by red tape but so far they have not done anything effective to deal with the problem. So the answer is, sadly, regulation is likely to get worse before it gets better. We can only hope that the tide will turn. In the meantime, the answer very clearly is not to fight against regulation but to ensure that processes are sufficiently well constructed and robust to enable you to provide a good ethical service to clients while keeping the Regulator happy and running a profitable business.

Surely your consultants can't be experts in every field?
All of our compliance consultants are professionally qualified with the majority holding the AFPC qualification as a minimum. In addition, they are required to maintain a sound working knowledge of the Financial Services market – obviously with a particular focus on regulation. It is fair to say however, that some of our people will inevitably have particular areas of expertise and, although our clients will have a dedicated consultant looking after them, another consultant can be involved should there be a need for an area of expertise that they hold.

We don't fully understand all of the compliance requirements. How do we know your consultants won’t take advantage of this to obtain more work from us?
At Haven we pride ourselves on the relationship we have with our clients. We firmly believe in developing long term client relationships and this can only be achieved if we are honest and open with our clients. If we feel that a client will not benefit from a particular service from us – we tell them. More often than not they will tend to retain us for periodic consultancy anyway or they come back to us in the future.

If we phone the Haven helpline, do we always get an immediate answer?
Not always. If you phone Head Office you will be put through to the appropriate consultant or you may indeed wish to phone your consultant yourself. If the consultant is on site with another client he or she might not be able to answer immediately and might in any case need to refer to one of our technical back up team in order to provide an accurate response. Having said that, the great majority of queries are responded to either immediately or within a couple of days.

Filling in the RMAR took me about three days and still the FSA sent it back saying I had not done it properly. Can Haven help with filling in this form?
Yes we can. Even by FSA standards, this form is appalling! A lot of the input, however, will need to come from your accountant. We do strongly recommend though that you start filling the form in as soon as you possibly can before the due date. During the first series of submissions of these reports we had a lot of problems through people simply not doing anything about them until the last minute.